Good morning, everyone. Again, sorry for the delay. Thank you, Douglas, for giving everyone a heads-up, and Eloise for emailing out to our attendees. We will be starting immediately, 10:15 A.M., 3:15 P.M. U.S. time for me in California. Thank you to Paul Hart for joining. I'll give you a quick introduction. Paul Hart is Head of Canary Capital, who have been our corporate advisors for the last two years. I asked Paul to join the webinar so he could give a bit of an overview on how they've worked with Biome and also ask some questions as well, a bit more interactive Q&A as well. Without further ado, we will jump in because I know I've held everyone up with our tech challenges this morning, resulting from myself dialing in from the U.S.
I'll start off with a really quick overview of Biome Australia, who we are and what we do. There may be some new people that are fresh to the story. Biome is one of the first global movers in the targeted or live biotherapeutic probiotic space. Back in 2016, we got involved in our first clinical trial prior to founding Biome, which was not founded in 2018. We've already been in the nutraceutical space for several years, which is, I suppose, more commonly known as the vitamin industry. We changed our philosophy and our process and our business model as well to really look at probiotics as the next generation in healthcare and preventative medicine.
This all started with a clinical trial that we got involved in in 2016 in pediatric allergic asthma. This clinical trial was looking at 440 children with asthma.
It was a placebo-controlled, randomized double-blind study on a very specialized, specific strain of bacteria that Biome now uses in our product, Biome Breathe. Over six months in the study population, we found a 64% reduction in asthma attacks, asthma events. That just changed the game for Biome. From that point onward, on surveying the global market, probiotics are a really nice commercial place to play, being they're the highest growth segment of the entire complementary medicine, vitamin, natural medicine market, whatever you like to call it. However, what's so unique about them is they are really specialized, they're very targeted, and the level of clinical backing around some of the probiotic strains that exist, many of which are our Biome's, is something quite unique.
It really gives doctors confidence, pharmacists confidence, and naturopaths confidence to be able to recommend these products, not just in a retail setting, but in clinical practice with their patients. Biome listed on the ASX in November 2021. The corporate journey has been a really exciting one for us after a tough first year on the ASX in 2022. We have been able to grow and build, I suppose, the understanding of the business in the wider investment community, but also take some meaningful steps forward with the growth of the revenue, but also the growth of the market cap of the company. What is really important to Biome is to understand our mission and why we do what we do. It is not just for profit. That is our main goal, to support generating shareholder wealth.
We really are motivated as a B Corp, B Corp certified organization, to prevent disease, improve health outcomes, and quality of life, but making our products accessible to all. What's so interesting about this statement is, you know, if we do improve health outcomes and prevent disease, we will sell more products, and our patients and customers will come back. We will make more money for our pharmacy partners, our practitioner partners. By having the most effective product, the best-in-class product, that is the most powerful marketing.
As our Activated Probiotics brand has shown, the repeat purchase levels and the sales levels have been incredibly strong, certainly in the first half of FY 2025. Very quick snapshot, the overview of the journey. I started my background in the business back in 2013 in a former company that we rolled into Biome.
Starting in 2019, we launched Activated Probiotics over here. So, being our most customers know us as Activated Probiotics, not Biome Australia, that is our flagship brand in the market that is, you know, one of the most widely used probiotic ranges in Australia now. We launched in 2019 from Melbourne, Australia, into only 100 pharmacies. As most people have seen, we gave an update to the ASX and to investors only a couple of weeks ago, saying we've now passed 6,000 distribution points in the Australian market since launching essentially at the beginning of 2020. It was the end of 2019 into the COVID market from Melbourne, Australia. A really strong achievement in getting mass national distribution. It's not an easy thing to do. Essentially, you've got big groups in Australia, like TerryWhite Chemmart, the largest with 650 pharmacies.
You have obviously Chemist Warehouse in the more retail discount end of the market. You have Priceline Pharmacy that are somewhere in between with the full service, focused more on beauty and health. For these types of retailers to take on a brand, they're only going to do that once it's de-risked. It is an ongoing development process for anyone in this space to be able to prove themselves, gain scale and volume in Australia before you can get on those shelves. To get to 6,000 is a huge milestone for Biome, which represents roughly 50% of that addressable market. In Australia now, Activated Probiotics is in more than 3,000 pharmacies.
It's about a touch over 50% of the addressable distribution market of pharmacies. We have 18 products, many of which are clinically proven products. The Activated Probiotics brand is positioned as practitioner only.
We sit the product as a very high-value proposition that is sold based on outcomes and solutions rather than a product or a price. It's not a push model like the vitamin industry, being that we are actually solving problems with clinically backed products on conditions. We're pulling patients in via the recommendation of a doctor, a pharmacist, a natural medicine professional, or a staff member, retail staff member in a community pharmacy. Across the range, I'll call out a couple of hero products. Part of the first launch back in 2019 was Biome Breathe that I already mentioned the clinical trial. This one is indicated for allergic asthma. Being that that's a disease or a protected condition, we can't talk about asthma, which also leads into the reason of why we are a professional or a practitioner-leaning brand.
Our team of health-qualified sales and education staff will detail doctors at their clinic or retail pharmacies in their pharmacy on the clinical trial, how the product works, and then how they can use that to really grow revenue in their dispensary and their pharmacy in general. Most recent product launch, Biome Cholesterol. This has had a lot of incredibly strong feedback, certainly from our investor community as well, many of which have started taking this product. The name speaks for itself. The product was studied in five randomized placebo-controlled double-blind studies over the last five years, and it has shown to significantly reduce cholesterol in an at-risk population. Two of the studies, the Biome Cholesterol was used alongside statins. Statins are a fairly common medication. Many of you will be aware of what a statin is.
A statin is the number one and two medication on the Australian PBS by volume. Those medications are in a class of medicines that reduce cholesterol. Doctors obviously are very concerned about this in the wider Australian population with the high incidences of death from heart-related conditions. Biome Cholesterol is a really, really interesting proposition. We've only had it on market for six months. It's selling quite well. It's definitely in the top half of the 18 products within six months. We expect it to be a top seller. What's most interesting about this product, not just its uniqueness, it's the perfect product to tell the story and explain to health professionals and patients alike that this product can be used alongside a medication.
This market, this we call it the adjunct or complement to medication market, is something that Biome has an opportunity to essentially own, being that there's no one else in the complementary medicine market able to recommend or sell a product alongside a drug. There's a couple of key reasons to this. Number one, most natural medicines, essentially anything that's not a probiotic, will have drug interactions or contraindications. Pharmacists will not, in any circumstances, recommend various vitamin products alongside drugs. Probiotics as a category never leave the digestive tract, so they do not have any interaction with drug metabolization of drugs. We have clinical evidence. The most important reason after risk is we have clinical evidence on the finished product for the condition used alongside the medication.
It is an opportunity to not just help a patient solve a health problem, as is the company's mission, but for pharmacies to have a brand new revenue stream that they never had in being able to co-sell. This product alone will generate roughly AUD 22 gross profit for the pharmacist, the pharmacy owner, on top of the AUD 6.80 prescription they're getting for a rosu statin, for example. If you think of that as a percentage and an opportunity, you know, it's a 300%-400% uplift in that transaction for the pharmacist at the same time as helping a patient and feeling good about doing something that's going to improve a patient health outcome. A couple of other products I'll briefly mention: Biome Eczema and Biome Acne. These are our dermatology section.
As you might imagine, they're going very well in Priceline Pharmacy, being that it has a strong emphasis in skin within their wider group and their younger female demographic. Biome Eczema is clinically proven in two studies, one on children, one on adults, to reduce eczema symptoms, not just prevent flare-ups, but reduce the symptoms once you have a flare-up and reducing symptoms by 52%. Biome Acne, again, reduces acne lesions by 40%. These are really material clinical outcomes on probiotic medicines that have never been detected before in the global market.
As Biome continues, we are seeing more companies pop up around the world with the idea of condition-specific, but we have locked down a lot of the IP and research, so they are exclusive to Biome. We really do not have any material competition in the market on conditions or diseases.
Biome Lift, a mental health concept. This has now got three clinical trials, including one that Biome led with La Trobe University, which was published late last year. That last study was on subthreshold depression. We have research on this product used for healthy people who are stressed, anxious, having poor sleep, significantly improving all of those areas of mental health concerns. Also now looking at a disease population in subthreshold depression, which is really important, certainly with the credibility for doctors. For Biome, rather than launching 15 or 20 new products every other year, we're actually increasing the use case of each product into new patient populations. It is a new way of doing things within our industry that has not really been seen before.
The idea of expanding the product into new populations, new targets, which is much more seen in the pharmaceutical world, as people will know now with a number of diabetes drugs now being used for weight loss. Essentially repurposing and finding new populations that we can expand the existing products like Biome Lift into. Biome IBS, this is one of our best-selling products. I think the name speaks for itself. Irritable bowel syndrome is one of the leading volume drivers of the probiotic category, and Biome has the best-in-class product based on the strains that we have and the evidence behind them.
Very effective product for IBS patients, and within a day or two, people usually see a significant reduction, if not a complete reduction in symptoms of IBS, which is bloating, diarrhea, or constipation and other gastrointestinal discomfort. Last but not least, Biome Dental.
This one also launched in 2024, I think in the second half of FY 2024, so first half of the calendar year. This is the world's leading oral probiotic, and this is not the last time you'll hear me talk about this because this is a really important product and topic in the future of healthcare. The exploding research around the oral microbiome is continuing, and the downstream effect of managing oral dysbiosis or, you know, not having the appropriate bugs in your oral cavity is significant.
Links to other downstream effects and diseases are starting to be discovered, a link, whether they're neurological breakdowns like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, or many other cardiovascular and/or metabolic health concerns that are now seeing a strong link to the start of your digestive tract, which essentially is your mouth. Biome Dental has 11 published clinical trials. It's our most well-evidenced product.
Significant reduction in gum disease or gingivitis, reduction in cavities or dental caries, and significant improvement of halitosis, which is essentially medical bad breath. Those are the products. A quick summary of the business highlights before I welcome Paul into the conversation. As we shared and already said, we've now expanded our Australian distribution to more than 6,000 points, which is about half of the addressable market for Biome. That's made up of health practitioners, which are integrative doctors, naturopaths, or community pharmacies, which community pharmacies represent about 68%-70% of our total revenue.
We have some very strong repeat purchase data, which I think is nice, certainly to see as an investor or shareholder in how well the business is doing at repeat purchase, not just scaling through signing up new accounts, but growing the base and the ongoing repeat purchase and use case of the product. TerryWhite Chemmart came up very kindly, shared with us a little while ago some of their rewards databases. It is hard to get meaningful scan data from retail for a brand that is sort of B2B or B2B2C.
They shared that our average customer is buying about two and a half monthly boxes per transaction, and they are returning at least six times a year, which is quite incredible because that does imply that they are buying more than 12 monthly boxes every 12 months on average.
For an e-commerce play, not Biome, if you're seeing three purchases of a monthly product in 12 months, that's typically seen as a very strong business for repeat purchase. For our customers showing that data, it does really underpin our growth, meaning that the product works and people, patients are coming back to buy it again and again. As a brand, Activated Probiotics has maintained the number one growth spot in our category. That's in vitamins and practitioner only in pharmacy. For the last four years plus, we've been the highest growth brand, and now we're also climbing the ranks to be one of the larger brands in the category as well. In our specific area, we're now number two to one other brand in terms of total revenue.
Number one in growth as well at TerryWhite Chemmart and Priceline Pharmacy, our two largest customers, the full-service community pharmacies and our wholesalers, Symbion and API, the pharmaceutical wholesalers. More recently, we launched the business in the Canadian market as a test. I'll talk to that more in a moment, but we've been in the EU markets through Ireland and the U.K. practitioner market for two years now and recently launched into the health retail market about 12 months ago. Sales for half one, if you weren't already aware, we closed out with AUD 8.9 million or a touch under AUD 8.9 million versus AUD 13 million for the entire last FY 2024. We've reached EBITDA now for four consecutive quarters.
As I'm sure you're aware and have seen on the slide, we announced net profit for the first time of roughly AUD 100,000, excluding our R&D rebate, or roughly AUD 400,000, including our R&D rebate for H1 FY 2024. Gross margin continues to improve. Pre-IPO, when the business was founded, the first few years, we were getting low 50%. We've now climbed into the 60%. My CFO, Douglas, who spoke briefly earlier for letting you know there was a delay, he and I are working quite hard with the rest of the team and our supply partners for that number to keep increasing, which is unusual, I think, for businesses like us.
As we scale, there's usually a lot of pressure on price and discounting. As Biome and our Activated Probiotics is a premium brand, we do not employ a discount model. We sell products that solve problems or solutions.
As a result, we are able to convince our retail partners to manage the full retail price, supporting everyone's margin. I think that's probably enough till I can hand over to Paul to join the conversation. Welcome, Paul.
G'day, Blair. Thanks for inviting me again today. First, I'll give a bit of background in terms of our involvement with Biome for the last two years. In fact, it's actually been longer than that because I came in as a seed investor. At Canary Capital, what we're looking for for our network of investors is outstanding companies to invest their money in. We want our job is to find these companies very early before the market has awoken up to and realized the real potential value that these companies can have. We were investing in Biome in seed. We also invested at the IPO.
It obviously dropped after the IPO. If we liked it at AUD 0.20, I'll tell you what, we really loved it at six and between sort of six and ten. That is where we actually ended up buying a lot of shares for ourselves and for clients. The performance of the investment has been absolutely outstanding. It is one of our best ones ever. It has been outstanding in terms of delivering six times, driven by the fact that the company has delivered on every single target that they have put out to the market. That really helps.
The market has recognized it. Now on to some discussion about the half year and the company. I am just going to say, firstly, a big congratulations to Blair on the arrival of your second baby girl. It is obviously an exciting time for you, hopefully getting some sleep.
How do you see this impacting your own, say, overseas travel plans, the amount of time you can spend expanding the business in relation to growing the overseas markets?
I suppose at the end of the day, it's life, isn't it? Very, very excited to have my second little girl join the family. All the aunties and uncles in the office will be thrilled with their extra babysitting duties as well. I mean, we released our—I have the slide up here, Vision 27. We released our Vision 27 to the ASX back in September. A key component of that is not just the revenue target of AUD 75 million-AUD 85 million over the next three years cumulatively. It's really the international market acceptance and growth.
I know that our insto investors, our retail investors, our 708s, and also future investors are all really focused on showing what's the scale going to be like, how are we going to execute our business model in these international markets? I can say I'm absolutely focused on that. What's key to being able to allow me to, A, have a second child, but also travel a lot has been we've really developed, worked hard to develop our line managers. I was asked this question on an interview the other day, but we've now got 10 key line managers that operate essentially in their own business silos. They have their own staff reporting into them. They have their own strategy. They have their own objectives. I'll check in with them every week, but they don't need to be micromanaged.
Long gone are the days that we're a startup run by one guy who I might get to get the pat on the back when things go well, or if we have a bad day, maybe the opposite. There really are some quite incredible people that I look forward to bringing in the forefront and introducing to shareholders and investors over the coming periods. Because of that, I've been able to spend a lot of time outside the office, also due to the fact of having a very supportive wife who's at home in Australia with my 15-year-old daughter, while 15-day-old daughter, while I'm sitting in California right now at Expo West, the biggest natural event of the year for us globally. Essentially, we now spend a lot of our year traveling.
The board has asked me to spend a significant amount of time between North America and Europe this year to really support my effort as CEO as head of sales to be able to continue to develop those markets. Hopefully, that gives people the confidence that the Australian business is well under control. It's growing well. I'm able to spend a lot more of my time strategically and bringing in value and growing those international markets.
Thanks, Blair. Just on the results, obviously, half one 2025, first net profit, which is a great result. Obviously, Australia is still the biggest portion of the business. What have been the strongest drivers of the revenue and profit growth for the company during the first half of FY 2025?
Look, I always like to tell the background of the last year or two on we do a lot of conservative things well, and they add up to a lot of growth and therefore reaching that milestone of net profits. At the end of the day, Activated Probiotics, our brand, has become a household name. The repeat purchase, the number of health professionals recommending it is quite astronomical. I mean, we've done it. We've estimated now there's more than 25,000 health professionals in any month recommending our product. There might be four or five working in one pharmacy. There might be 10 or 12 working in a single medical or naturopathic clinic that are recommending it. They all show up as one account.
The sheer volume of health professionals that have now decided Activated Probiotics is best in class, most trusted product certainly within the probiotic space, if not the complete complementary medicine market, has allowed us to leverage that trust. Look, some companies, some brands really rely on marketing messages. We've taken the more painful and difficult approach to build trust, to build trust with health professionals and essentially gain their endorsement. About a year and a half ago, we saw a significant increase in our market cap and our growth rate actually increased with Activated Probiotics. We saw the word of mouth and the brand becoming a household name. For example, we'd switch on a pharmacy in Northern Territory that our sales reps didn't even know had the product because they would have just bought it through the wholesaler.
These pharmacies have never been trained, do not know about us. They have 15-20 boxes going out the door just from customers coming in and asking. What has really transitioned is the number of customers asking for the product is now significantly greater than the health professionals recommending it, which is the key driver of the business. What has translated to net profit is I have got an incredible CFO, Douglas, who is listening in. I will give him a nice compliment rather than a gentle jab. Doug has been incredibly diligent in managing the finances of the business and, most importantly, the supply chain. Our supply chain, for those who do not know, a lot of the products come in from Italy, and they are coming in as finished goods, which is a logistical challenge, to put it politely.
Doug and the operations team have done a wonderful job at making sure we have just enough, not too much inventory to be able to support that growth, but also be super tight on the OpEx line as well. About two years ago, we completed an investment in staffing and education and support to be able to build the business to essentially the level we got to, to net profit. That was bringing on people. That OpEx line detached, and our revenue is now growing at a much faster rate than our increase in costs.
Excellent. Margin's very healthy for the products. Overall, the average is running at about 61% for the half year. Where do you see this trending over the remainder of the Vision 27 Strategic Plan? What's likely to be the major drivers of margin going forward?
Yeah, I think you'll love putting me in the hot seat. Thanks for that one, Paul. Look, I've got to be careful as a public company CEO on what statements I'll make that haven't happened yet. Personally, I'd love to see it get toward the mid-60%. That's a goal that I have and Doug has. We're working toward that. While we can't guarantee that, the signals are all pointing in the right direction. The supply partners are working with us to constantly optimize and improve quality and pricing inputs for us. We're also the highest growth brand with our supply partners. They all love working with us. They see our business model as really high value and unique and unlike any of their other partners. We're getting increased investments from that side to help improve margin as well.
At the end of the day, what really destroys margin is getting bigger and starting to employ a discount model to support growth. We believe we can sustain higher growth levels without giving that away by continually opening up new opportunities for existing products, as I alluded to earlier, by having more clinical evidence on Biome Lift for depression versus just stress. Being able to do that allows us to continue ramping up growth without overinvesting in new product launches or a deep discount model. That essentially underpins the margin going down. We keep chipping away on optimizing it by volume discounts and being very, very careful to make good decisions.
Yep. Okay. Your sales target for the three years is a cumulative AUD 75 million-AUD 85 million. How are you tracking against the strategic plan in terms of delivering on that target?
Yeah, you said something earlier that I really appreciated. We beat every number that we put out to market. I certainly would not have signed off on this 75-85 if I did not feel 100% confident. We are certainly not in the business of calling out a forecast and making a mistake on it because that would be obviously detrimental. I have also been told it is very unusual for Australian companies to give a three-year guidance. It is much more like some of the Japanese companies that take much longer-term views.
Where we are at right now, we are well ahead on the distribution goal. One of the key points—I will put the slide back up—one of the key points was taking distribution from 5,000 distribution points to—sorry, I got the wrong one, but that is fine—from 5,000 distribution points to 8,000 distribution points in six months or less.
We've already done the first thousand. So, we're well ahead on that metric. Sales, I can't give a forecast that I haven't given out to market anyway. But if we just use the numbers that everyone knows, the roughly AUD 9 million for the first half, we are ahead of schedule. We're certainly on track. The best way to explain how we're tracking sales-wise is the three-year cumulative target. I think to the top end is about 45% CAGR, compounded annual growth rate, from AUD 13 million last year up to scaling up equally percentage growth to the top end of that cumulative target.
Currently, the last three years, we're running over 70% compounded annual growth rate. So, I believe we're well on track on all components, including international markets, that we will be bringing an update out to the market soon.
Fantastic.
Just on distribution, the slide on chart 17, if Doug or you could bring it up, is very interesting regarding the growth of sales revenue. Obviously, it's going to be a key factor in delivering on the AUD 75 million-AUD 85 million. Could you just give us a bit of an interpretation, your interpretation on this chart, please?
Yeah, with pleasure. Look, it is a very interesting chart, actually. It's something that we've never modeled on map before for investors. Essentially, I'll just—let me zoom in a little bit so everyone can see it properly. Essentially, this is FY 2021 to FY 2024. We do have the data for FY 2025, but being that we haven't put out a forecast for the last half year, I wasn't able to share that at this point. You can see for FY 2021, we had essentially close to no sales.
I think by the end of the year, we did roughly AUD 890,000, but we did—FY 2021, we had a couple of hundred accounts. As you can see, yes, we've significantly grown our distribution base. That's 2,000 accounts in FY 2021. FY 2020 was 100. We've significantly increased our distribution base up to 6,000 accounts in the Australian market. The rate of revenue growth has been dramatic and detached from that line. The way I explain that best is our sales growth is organic. It's business development. It's growing same-store sales, as we frequently share with the market updates on our same-store sales, which tend to run fairly closely in line with our top-line revenue growth because Biome's growth is not from signing up new accounts or launching products, which is quite common in the VMS market, the vitamin market.
Our sales, the bulk of our sales and our growth is all the underlying business. This just shows, I suppose, with this based on, I suppose, the 13 from last year, revenue's growing a lot faster than the accounts are signing up. We will have, obviously, an update on that for this year, which will be even more dramatic. It's really important to note that of the existing 6,000 accounts, there are only about 30%-40% developed. There's a huge amount of opportunity still in our existing distribution before we need to add another 500, 1,000, 2,000 accounts to that underlying distribution.
You mentioned, obviously, Biome Cholesterol was the last NPD new product development launched by the company. It's great to hear that sales are going well. What other new product development launches have you got?
Are you expecting in the second half of the year and beyond during the—
I can talk to the things that we have announced. We have announced Activated Therapeutics, our new brand. We will be giving a meaningful update to the market on exactly what those products are. I was asked from the board to hold off a little while on updating the market just because a lot of competitors are watching Biome. Everyone in the market is buying our scan data and watching what we are doing. They are most interested in figuring out how we keep managing to do it year after year and keep growing at such a rapid rate. We are holding our cards close to our chest. The products that we—at least four products initially launching in that new brand—we have targeted this financial year, although it will be at the back end of Q4.
Those products will be launched straight into our existing practitioner distribution market. We do have some new products coming for Activated Probiotics as well, our flagship brand. I will be looking forward to getting an update out to market soon on those. I can confirm there will be new products coming out for Activated Probiotics and several new products in the new Activated Therapeutics brand, initially in Australia. We do expect both of those to scale into our international markets very quickly thereafter.
Excellent. You talked a little bit before about selling probiotics alongside medicines. Now, Canary Capital sees this as a huge opportunity for the company. Given how effective the probiotics have been in proper double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials, the potential is amazing, obviously, in terms of growing the business over the next 5 to 10 years. Can you give us an update?
You mentioned Biome Cholesterol before as being potential being sold alongside statins. What other products in the range do you think have the potential to be sold alongside medicines? Can you tell us about the process for achieving this goal?
Yeah, look, it's not an easy task. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It's something that no one's been able to achieve before. Also, there's never been a brand in our industry with products with our safety profile and our level of clinical evidence. Sorry that this is not in the proper slide deck. I've lost my other slides somewhere in the background. These are the products that I'll highlight that were a core focus. I'll talk through the process. Biome Lift for mental health, this is able to be prescribed should a doctor or pharmacist decide to.
It's at their discretion alongside SSRIs, which are antidepressant medication, anti-anxiety medication, sleeping medication, or even other complementary medicines for stress or stress or anxiety or sleep. That's been a core one in our focus. Biome Her, believe it or not, is one of the most successful products. Biome Her has got clinical trials to significantly reduce female health concerns, namely bacterial vaginosis and thrush. Not the easiest inner-table topics. However, for women, they affect almost all women at different points in their life. They're recurring problems. I suppose the days are gone now that the tube of Canesten Cream, the antifungal in the medicine cabinet at home, are going to be effective enough. Unfortunately, for a lot of women, there will be recurrent requirement to take antibiotics over and over and over to solve these problems.
That just leads to more recurrence, more recurrence, and other issues from the antibiotics. Biome Her has been a very successful one, sold alongside antifungal, sold alongside some of the antibiotics. That one's going quite well. Biome Cholesterol, I've already spoken to. Biome Lift, mental health, Biome Cholesterol alongside statins and other cholesterol-reducing medications. Biome Her, Biome Breathe alongside asthma medications, whether that be breathable steroids or Ventolin inhalers. One of the other ones that really stands out to us is Biome Osteo, which is one of our more exciting products I didn't even mention earlier, which was studied, shown to reduce bone loss by 78% in an at-risk female population. This one could be used alongside either a bisphosphonate drug or a Prolia injection that women routinely take to improve their bone density or reduce the risk of osteoporosis.
How do we do it? We've developed a lot of very technical sales and education materials that I'm not going to give away, all of our petty competitors that could be listening at any point. We have technical materials and resources that we detail with doctors and pharmacists. We set reminders, and we set programs with pharmacy groups. For example, I'm not going to say too specifically, but TerryWhite Chemmart, Priceline, some of our bigger national groups, Blooms The Chemist. We work with them directly on different programs to set reminders and that recommendation pattern in the pharmacy dispensary for those dispensary staff. Ideally, how it works is a patient will come in.
They'll hand over a prescription to the dispensary staff in the pharmacy. Notably, this is called the script in counter. You'll then sit down and wait for them to prepare your prescription.
I'm sure everyone's been through this experience, even the healthiest people. While you're waiting, they'll prepare it. If we've done our job well, they'll grab a box of Biome Lift alongside an antidepressant medication, maybe Prozac. The pharmacist will then detail the patient at the script out counter. They'll explain. Firstly, they'll ask, "Have you used this medication before? Do you know these are some of the side effects? You should take it with a glass of water before a meal or after a meal." At that point, they'll say, "We also have something really interesting we'd like to talk to you about.
We have this product, Biome Lift, subject to three clinical trials, completely safe, can be taken alongside the medication, and will significantly improve some of your feelings of depressed mood, anger, anxiety. Mental health is a difficult one to talk about, but it's a good example of one that can really support the medication. Unfortunately, for a lot of sufferers of depression, some people listening may have experienced this themselves or via a loved one. These medications for mental health are known to be roughly 30%-35% effective. There are different drugs that work for some and not for others.
There is a window, certainly with mental health, of about four weeks before some of these antidepressant medications work, which is a perfect opportunity for Biome Lift to do some of the heavy lifting, make that person feel a lot better, and then potentially prevent some pretty bad outcomes for people suffering with mental health. That's roughly the program. We do have formalized structures within it that I don't want to go into too much detail on. As I said, a lot of other people would like to be doing what we're doing in this space. Essentially, the goal of this is for us to be the number one revenue driver in each pharmacy. We are constantly seeing results of us turning over significantly greater volume than the biggest vitamin companies at an individual pharmacy level.
The company recently, or last year, announced the development of its own wholly owned probiotic strain, BMB18, which has now been registered with the strain bank in DSMZ, strain bank in Germany. We see this as obviously having the potential to become a significant asset on the balance sheet of Biome. You've got the initial in vitro, which means in the lab results from research. Can you talk us through the initial findings from the research, please? Also outline what the next pathway, the pathway to commercialization for the strain is?
Absolutely. I mean, this is a very exciting topic. I hope people enjoy following along BMB18's development. So far, we're well ahead of schedule as it's a component of Vision 27. Traditionally, in our space, brands—I think I mentioned Blackmores before. I'll say Blackmores.
Blackmores was, prior to being sold to the Japanese, a brilliant sales and marketing machine, but not really a science-based business. Where Biome's found its niche is we're heavily involved in the science, the research, the development, which makes us an authority over any other brand or company to be able to talk about these topics to doctors. What we wanted to do is to continue to develop that into owning more IP. We do own the rights to our top five products, which represent more than 70% of our sales. Important to note. Actually owning probiotic strains ourselves is a new frontier. Traditionally, you'd be spending upwards of $5 million to actually acquire this type of IP for a business or a startup or a biotech. Then you've got the development costs.
Biome's been able to leverage some incredibly strong partnerships we've got in our R&D area of the business to be able to secure this incredible strain, BMB18. We also were able to, at cost price, fast-track this development, the in vitro study you mentioned. We saw some very strong applications in the strain demonstrating its ability to reduce, modulate, so reduce oxidative stress, modulate the immune system, which is core to the mechanism of action for any probiotic, reducing oxidative stress and maintaining intestinal barrier integrity.
That's a really key one as well. What does that mean? Maintaining intestinal barrier integrity. Essentially, it's now noted by many doctors that a lot of diseases are coming from severe inflammation in the gut. How does that happen? Through use or overuse of medications, poor diet, bad lifestyle, stress, over time, the tight junctions which form the wall of the intestine.
Essentially, they're a wall. They look like little fingers. When they're healthy, they're together like this. Over time, they can start to break apart. Intentionally, it's called leaky gut in the non-medical sense or intestinal hyperpermeability. What that leads to is things leaking into the body outside of the gut and the immune system activating, causing systemic inflammation. Really strong probiotic strains have shown the ability to retighten those tight junctions in the gut and significantly reduce the potential for long-term disease impact. For a probiotic strain, you want to see that a really strong strain, you want to see it having strong anti-inflammatory effects. Part of that is by improving the tight junctions. Potentially, more importantly, being a really strong candidate for reducing inflammation and/or general gastrointestinal health.
The strain's shown really strong outcomes across immune and gut health targets, which is what we wanted it to do. Now that it's been deposited, it's ready for use. Commercially, we've already had it scaled up to production. It's getting really good yields. Different probiotic strains have very different yields. Some will cost AUD 3,000-AUD 4,000 a kilogram to manufacture because you get so little CFU per gram or per kilogram in fermentation. Others might be AUD 300 or AUD 400. Understanding the nuances and the speciality of this space is critical to be successful. We've got a really strong strain in BMB18. We did release for the market that we do have a clinical development pipeline. We partnered with FaBA, which is the Food and Beverage Accelerator, to help support with a 50% grant that ongoing clinical development pipeline.
The example that I have mentioned before, and we're certainly not making any statements on what this will or won't be worth, but there's a famous strain, Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG, trademarked LGG, that was sold by some Finnish researchers to Chr. Hansen, one of the largest probiotic manufacturers, I think back in 2018, for a small sum of EUR 70 million or EUR 80 million. These strains are very valuable. Once they're commercialized, they can be used and sold. And Biome does have the license or the ability to license out as well should we want to. It gives us huge strategic protection from advances of any other companies by being able to put it in our products and really differentiate them across the next decade.
What's the timeline to seeing the first product containing BMB18 Blair, do you think? Any rough guidelines?
Technically, we could use it right now. To get a new product to market is roughly six months lead time. We are reviewing right now where we want to see it put. Right now, we haven't signed off on the exact plan. There are opportunities to add it as a high-value strain to some of our mainstream products like Biome Daily, Biome Daily Kids, which are knowing that it's such a good strain and it's now clinically backed by this in vitro research would be a value add. We are also looking to sign off on this clinical pipeline as well to get some more data on irritable bowel syndrome and inflammation because on the back of that, this product will be a great standalone strain as its own product.
I know that's not the answer that you wanted, but I also have to respect the rules of being a public company on not sharing too much. There will be material new product development coming. It will be coming within the next year or two, absolutely.
Fantastic. One last discussion point from me, international expansion. As the Australian market matures over the next few years, it's going to become a more important driver of future growth for the company. You've obviously launched into a couple of European markets, the U.K. and Ireland. You recently launched into the Canadian market with Ecotrend Ecologics in September 2024. Can you give us some background about Ecotrend and talk about some early indications that obviously have been released to the market following the new market launches in international markets?
Yeah, look, I think most people are asking me more questions about North America and Canada than the European market that's been established now for a couple of years and is in growth. On that briefly, we're seeing some really strong increases in the number of accounts signing up in both U.K. and Ireland. We only launched—excuse me—we only launched into the retail market, i.e., pharmacies and health food shops in the last 10-12 months. That development piece is coming along nicely. We're looking to add further distributors along that pathway just to do the last mile. We launched initially going direct to the pharmacies as well. Once we have a few more distributors in place in U.K. and Ireland, that's going to be very helpful to keep maintaining this rapid growth we're seeing.
I think we've announced, or it's on the slide here, that we grew 95% last year. I'd like the team to increase that growth next year. We'll see how they go by the end of FY 2025. Canada, a very interesting piece. We brought the model that we developed in the U.K., which is our international scale model. We've learned from the mistakes from big brands before us. Blackmores having a famous failure in China and Swisse a famous failure in the U.S. While I'm certainly not bad-mouthing competitors, they're both brilliant businesses that did incredibly well. They did have some bumps along the way. Most of those were with international markets and scale where a lot of Australian brands that are successful sometimes struggle.
What we've done is we've built a very conservative model where we will leverage our Australian business, leverage our research, and our focus on practitioner only. We will start off with health professionals, whether they're doctors, integrative doctors, natural medicine professionals like naturopaths. We spend time winning them over. They're the key opinion leaders. They're our marketing channel. They're also very affordable to win over. We win them over with trust, with quality, with products, with research, and with our technical ability to detail the products.
Once we've got them, it's much lower risk for us to enter retail pharmacy instead of going guns blazing into Whole Foods in the U.S.A. and then having to support the marketing cost with no rate of sale or existing customers. Essentially, that traditional international scale model would be a recipe for risk and disaster.
For Biome, we went into Canada. We launched with health professionals. We're rapidly, every month, seeing a huge growth in the number of naturopathic doctors, which is unique to Canada. They're medically qualified naturopaths using the product in their clinical practice. Being that the feedback from Canada was so strong, so overwhelmingly strong on the type of product, the evidence, and our approach, a lack of competition, being that Health Canada does raise a very high bar for international brands to get in, we've launched now into health retail, being pharmacies and health food stores well ahead of schedule, being that we didn't have a choice because it was going so well. I don't want to get ahead of myself and say too much. There will be a more official update coming on international markets.
I am very pleased sitting in my chair with how North America is going early days. Hopefully, it is an indication as well that I am sitting in the U.S.A. right now that the right conversations are going to set us up for the next few years as well without rushing into any new markets.
That is it for me. As always, Blair, it is great to talk to you about the business, especially since it has been so successful in recent years. May the success continue for the rest of Vision 27 and beyond.
Thank you, Paul. We appreciate your support. Look, I have got a long list of questions that have been sent through. I am going to rush through them as quickly as I can. I do not want to miss out on anyone's questions. The first one was a straightforward one. Why was the webinar a little delayed?
I think having a new addition to my family was definitely the priority over the last two weeks. We welcome our second baby girl. I think I mentioned at the beginning on the 19th of February. I have been at home in the bubble and pleased to be now allowed back out by my wife to be doing my job and speaking to you all. What percentage of your distribution would you consider fully penetrated? I did speak to this earlier. We would say roughly 30%-35% of our Australian distribution is fully penetrated. It does not mean it cannot grow further, though, because as we continue activating those co-selling with drugs, that is a whole new market that I see is not limitless, but has huge scale in that there are 330 million prescriptions a year.
If you divide that by the 6,000 pharmacies, that's a lot of opportunities to build a business significantly larger than Blackmores just in that space. Why did you stop breaking out international revenue? As I mentioned, we will be putting that out. We've traditionally only done it at full-year accounts, not half-year. We will be giving an update on international markets. I can't give an exact date on it because I'm not allowed to, but we're working on an update on that now. As I said, I'm very bullish and quite excited about how things are tracking outside the Australian borders. Update on a manufacturing process. Yes, that was a component of Vision 27. Biome is reviewing opportunities to onshore manufacturing of finishing of our products, which is the last mile. It's the packaging component.
Right now, the logistics, as I mentioned earlier, is bringing everything in finished from Italy because Italy has the highest quality manufacturers in our space. There is no one currently in the Australian market that we see can meet our quality standards. We are under a review currently. It has been a year and a half project looking at local partners, looking at potential for doing it ourselves as well. There is an ongoing process, but we do expect to have some material updates on that within this calendar year. The general Canadian market. Yeah, look, I will dig into that slightly further. Can you tell us more about the general Canadian market is the question. As I started to talk about, the naturopath in Australia is a three-year health qualification.
Usually, they're very strong at their technical ability, but they don't come with the credibility of being a medical doctor. In the Canadian market, sorry, medical professionals, doctors, have the ability to specialize in natural medicine. You complete your medical degree over seven or eight years, and then you go specialize in herbal medicine, natural medicine, probiotics, for example. We're talking about people that are very progressive that really understand updating themselves on the new research on things like probiotics. They're also very integrative in their approach. They'll recommend a drug, but then also a probiotic to support that patient, potentially reduce the side effect or a symptom of that drug using something like a probiotic. The market is also very interesting in that Health Canada has very high barriers to entry.
It's based off the TGA system, which is seen as the global leader within complementary medicine for regulation and health claims. Health Canada is the same, except they're very strict on pharmaceutical GMP manufacturing as a baseline for anyone in the probiotic market. That rules out the entire US, European, and Asian markets that market these products as food supplements, not medicines. Under the TGA, we are a listed medicine, and we manufacture under pharmaceutical GMP quality, the highest possible quality.
That is a huge barrier to entry for anyone coming in wanting to compete with us in Canada or the existing brands that exist in Canada. The other thing, the final thing that's very interesting about this market is there is a rebate scheme on the Canadian healthcare system in certain parts of Canada to get a rebate on a probiotic.
Our product can be dispensed or prescribed by a naturopathic doctor, and then that patient can get a rebate either through the national system or the healthcare provider, which is quite incredible and certainly boosts the opportunity to do much higher volume of our products through individual health professionals. You've previously shared the 12-month rolling sales for TerryWhite Chemmart and Priceline. Those are our two largest pharmacy chains. Any new info you can share on this? Yes, I can actually. The first night I was allowed out of the house was last Wednesday, a week ago. Biome and Activated Probiotics, I'm very pleased to share, just won Supplier of the Year, Retail Supplier of the Year with TerryWhite Chemmart. TerryWhite Chemmart is Australia's leading health and service-focused pharmacy. They support more patients with meaningful health concerns.
They're the largest group as well with 660-odd pharmacies, the next biggest Chemist Warehouse, about 450. The most locations, the highest service and healthcare offering. To win supplier of the year with them is quite incredible. I note that our scan sales with them continue to grow at a rapid rate, passing AUD 4 million in scan sales, I think, last month. Address a difficult one, the recent share price. The recent share price performance has been behind what I expect given how well the company has delivered operationally and financially. Any idea why the market is not responding more positively? I can't comment to the exact reason of supply and demand on the ASX, but yes, it can be frustrating when you continually deliver incredible outcomes. Within a particular month, maybe we don't see the share price increase.
We all know right now the general market conditions are not great, certainly not for micro and small cap. There's a man over in the U.S. at the moment that's ruffling a few people's feathers on global financial markets. I am certainly not going to blame that for our share price performance. I think, as Paul mentioned earlier, that we take a long view on this.
The market often gets it wrong on the day, but long-term, this old saying, the old adage is, it gets it right long-term, and we keep delivering. I do personally expect significant improvements or growth in our share price over the coming quarters, over the coming years. I do not have a crystal ball, but the one thing I can say is we're working very hard to underpin our share price and to support the opportunity of it increasing. How do we do that?
We're working hard to bring in new groups of investors, fresh eyes, exciting people that are getting their position now at AUD 0.50-AUD 0.60-AUD 0.70 rather than AUD 0.10 or AUD 0.20. A lot of our investors have already made a lot of money. You need to constantly, on the ASX, refresh and rebuild your register, which is something we're doing. Right now, at our current market cap, there's huge interest from institutional-grade investors. We have a number of funds now on the register, and I have several handful of them asking for an opportunity to get into the business as well.
As we continue to grow, bringing on more and more institutional funds, we believe should underpin that share price and support us and continue to grow it. I'm always happy to address that topic. How do you view your growth rates going forward?
Look, as we all know, growth works against you. You can't always be 80% growth every year because otherwise you'd be bigger than the Australian economy in about 10 years. We do believe we continue to grow our dollar value growth each year at a higher rate than the year before it. It is growing at a very good rate. How do we do this? We do a lot of things conservatively well. I mentioned that before. It's not about another 10 products or going into another 1,000 stores overnight. It's about doing small things really well. The best education, the best service, the best support leads to high levels of revenue at individual pharmacies, individual practitioner accounts. We keep doubling down on what we do really well, and we keep getting the results.
There is a long way to go before we tap out the Australian market. A bit of a benchmark, not a forecast, but similar brands in our space that are at the top end of the market are doing AUD 100 million-AUD 150 million turnover just in Australia. Those are practitioner-only brands like Activated Probiotics. That is before you look at that dispensary opportunity with co-selling with drugs. That is before you consider things like these different international markets that we are already penetrating and having success in.
There is a lot to come. I hope Vision 27 and the confidence we have to share those revenue guidance within that plan, people have trust that there is a lot more to come beyond Vision 27. I have just been told we are well over time, so we need to wrap up.
Last question is on inventory level or squeezing because that's an important one for people. What inventory level do you target in terms of dollars? Traditionally, over the last year or two, we've looked at a range between AUD 2.5 million-AUD 3 million to be optimal inventory level with our current supply chain and current lead time on products. This allows us to really support our growth and to make sure that we have enough to dramatically scale. We don't see a massive increase in inventory holding because we're working to improve our lead time. Therefore, that scale of inventory can be turned over rather than twice a year. It can get turned over four or five times a year is our goal.
We'd like to think that at least for the next couple of years, we can maintain not requiring a lot more than AUD 3 million at cost in inventory, which would support about AUD 7 million-AUD 8 million at wholesale price in revenue coming in. It's more about increasing the stock turn than having to increase more of our capital expenditure and cash flow into inventory. Right now, we feel pretty confident that we've got a good level. We are also making sure that we've got certain things in place now that we're profitable, such as support from the Big Four banks, which is something that we are working on in the background as well to support inventory funding. Thank you for all your support. Thank you for coming.
I apologize again for the short delay in getting things started, but from my perspective, it was an absolutely exceptional first half of FY 2025. Operationally, results and the amount of key strategic things that move forward in the quarter and the news flow, I'm very, very pleased with. I look forward to giving updates on many other things that I couldn't close the full response on at this meeting in the coming periods. From the bottom of my heart, I do really appreciate all of your support. We've got a very supportive shareholder base and a top 50 that, frankly, hasn't changed over the last year or two.
As we look forward to bringing on more and more institutional-grade investors, I hope that we've still got something really special and important for our 708s and our retail investors as we continue to grow this business.
Thank you again. I look forward to speaking with you all soon.