On behalf of the Washington DC chapter, we would like to share the following investment opportunity:

 

Pathotrak’s technology reduces the detection time of food-safety tests from 1-2 days to as little as 2.5 hours, helping food manufacturers cut costs on staffing, warehousing, and refrigeration, enabling earlier product release and faster recalls, and avoiding outbreaks.

 

From August 2015 to January 2016, Chipotle hemorrhaged $8 billion in market value following an E. coli outbreak. This incident was merely one of roughly 1,000 such cases that transpire yearly in the United States, leading to aggregate financial losses surpassing $55 billion, coupled with illness and mortality. The prevailing 1-2 day "rapid" testing methods compel the food industry to strike a balance between product shelf-life and profitability versus consumer safety, and creates a bottleneck in the food supply chain that persists to this day.

 

PROBLEM & MARKET

The government is tightening food safety testing regulations. PCR, the gold standard for detecting pathogens, requires 22 to 48 hours for "enrichment" to grow pathogens to detectable levels, with no viable alternative currently available. In the US, the Total Addressable Market (TAM) for pathogen testing is $19 billion. The Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM), focusing on Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria testing, is valued at $7.9 billion, 66.4% of the TAM. Our initial Target Markets, Meat and Produce, represent a combined $1.7 billion market value.
 

SOLUTION

Pathotrak’s AOAC-accredited, award-winning technology separates pathogens directly from the food sample after as little as 3.5 hours of incubation for beef, 5.5 hours for fresh produce, and no time at all for poultry. Our technology enables in-line product food-safety testing and the release of product within a single 8-hour shift. It is the first and only AOAC accredited technology to be this fast and as accurate as the 3-4 days FDA standard method for testing.

 

GO TO MARKET STRATEGY

Current customer-segment: (2 customers, 8 prospective in pipeline) Top-ten contract labs, covering over 50% of the contract testing market, growing at 9% CAGR. Our disposables offer competitive advantage on turnaround time and increased capacity.

Second customer-segment: Corporate (high-throughput) labs of large food producers. Our disposables cut logistic costs and increase shelf life.

 

COMPETITION

Our product is complementary to most commercial detection technologies and we directly compete with vendors of enrichment media and enrichment disposables – Neogen, Bio-Rad, BioMerieux, ThermoFisher, Hygiena etc. These competitors have expressed interest in Pathotrak as a ‘game changer’, and we have partnered with four of them for common regulatory approval.