Great Wrap, an Australian husband-and-wife sustainable packaging company, has held a $24 million Series A round ahead of the launch of its commercial bioplastics business.
According to The Australian Financial Review report, the raise included $11 million from investors such as Thomas Food International’s Darren Thomas and Woolworths’ venture arm W23, as well as $13 million in asset finance from DLL Group, Rabobank’s asset financing division.
The new funding, along with a $3 million seed round last year, will allow Great Wrap to begin processing potato waste into the compostable bioplastic PHA for stretch wraps at its Tullamarine site.
“There’s only a few biorefineries of this kind around the world and very few of the scale that we’re going to,” Jordy Kay told the paper. “Once fully commissioned it will be the biggest PHA biorefinery in the southern hemisphere.”
“We now have the capacity to manufacture all of Australia’s stretch wrap, thanks to our impact-aligned investors,” said Julia Kay.
The company estimates an annual total of 50,000 tonnes of potato waste will be converted into stretch wrap at the site, which will hire another 100 staff. Great Wrap currently operates another Victorian site on the Mornington Peninsula.
First launched in 2020 during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic by Jordy and Julia Kay, a winemaker and an architect respectively, the process was developed via a CRC-P project with Monash University, with its scaling up assisted through an Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre Commercialisation Fund grant. Their first product was a compostable cling wrap.
According to Julia Kay, the company would launch a commercial product in two months, a pallet wrap, with thousands of customers expressing interest. Great Wrap aims to address the 150,000 tonnes of cling, silage and pallet wrap that go into Australian landfills each year.
