How Farmwall Plans to Revolutionise Dining By Helping Eateries Grow Their Own Food
How Farmwall Plans to Revolutionise Dining By Helping Eateries Grow Their Own Food
Claire Heaney, Herald Sun
December 6, 2017
In the Herald Sun’s ongoing series on Victorian entrepreneurs with great ideas, we meet the team bringing farm freshness to Melbourne eateries — without the need for a paddock.
THE mission? Reduce “food miles”, waste and packaging while bringing food production closer to where the food is eaten.
The solution? Small-scale “farms” inside the very cafes and eateries that will use their produce.
It’s a revolution that an enterprising Victorian start-up business, Farmwall, wants to usher in.
Founded by Geert Hendrix, Farmwall provides small, vertical gardens that are similar in dimension to bookcases.
Geert Hendrix wants eateries across Melbourne to grow their own food. Picture: Tony Gough
The gardens, planted with microgreens — young, edible greens — will initially be installed at cafes and in kitchens.
Based at Alphington, in Melbourne’s inner north east, the social enterprise uses aquaponic principles, which combine aquaculture and hydroponics so fish and plants are grown in an integrated system.
Farmwall undertook a successful crowd-funding campaign, raising more than $30,000 to get the business started.
Each Farmwall prototype cost $10,000, but Mr Hendrix says he expects that as the system is finetuned, the cost will be substantially reduced.
The Farmwall prototypes cost about $10,000, but the cost is expected to fall.
They will be made available on a subscription basis, where businesses pay for use of the vertical farm and for weekly upkeep.
Mr Hendrix says the business came about after he quit his long-time job as a sales manager in March last year and became an Uber driver while he worked out the next step.
“I was really keen to get back to basics,” he says.
He read widely and was looking for something that would give him a sense of purpose and an income.
Mr Hendrix, right, assembled a team to fuel the venture, including Serena Lee, who has branding and marketing experience.
The challenge was building on activities he enjoyed, including spending time outside, to create a business that would combine passion and talent, and earn an income.
“I also drew on the idea of Japanese Ikigai, which means having a reason to get up in the morning.” he says.
“I was doing the morning runs to the airport and was meeting some interesting people. It was always a good opportunity to have a conversation about things that could change the world.”
He assembled a core team including Serena Lee, with branding and marketing experience, and Wilson Lennard, an aquaponics expert.
He also has an advisory group of other experts who provide know-how and have equity in the business.
He says the idea of the Farmwall urban farms was to replicate what a large farm could do, but in an city environment.
Mr Hendrix says the business was fortunate to have the operator of cafes Top Paddock in Richmond and Higher Ground in the city take an interest.
In coming weeks, the Farmwall will be installed at the restaurants, ensuring fresh crops of microgreens are on hand for chefs.
Melbourne’s vibrant cafe scene is ripe for an in-house garden revolution, Farmwall believes.
In the meantime, a Farmwall established at a business incubation hub is supplying five local businesses with microgreens. Mr Hendrix says the enterprise is seeking feedback and suggestions from those businesses.
He expects that in the future, businesses may pay for Farmwall gardens through financing deals offered by companies that specialise in leasing out equipment. The benefits of Farmwall are many, he says, including cutting water and energy costs and providing fresh produce.
Cafes and restaurants go through a lot of microgreens and they are expensive and often do not keep well packaged in plastic, he says.
The Farmwall is one metre long, 40cm deep and two metres high.
The cafe industry is always evolving, Mr Hendrix says, and is looking to differentiate itself and embrace new ways of doing things.
The business is at an early stage, he says, but he can see a time when Farmwalls could be installed at aged-care facilities, in schools and at residential apartment buildings.
While grateful for the help of crowd-funding, Mr Hendrix says the process can be exhausting. But, he says, entrepreneurs have to get out of their comfort zones to make crowd-funding work.
Many people espouse the virtues of crowd-funding, he says, but those people often need to be prompted and reminded that they are “the crowd”.
What our experts say ...
John Downes
Business coach, Acorro.com.au
WELL done Geert, Serena and Wilson. Microgreens grown at the place of consumption, reducing food miles while maximising freshness and adding visible eco-sustainability features to the restaurant — I’d love that at home.
Business coach and social media guru John Downes is the director of the Acorro business advisory group.
Two issues: What is your implementation and deployment plan to get the first three Farmwalls installed with customers?
Conceptualising and prototyping a product for a production run of one is gruelling. Delivering on scale in the field takes a whole new realm of skills, relationships, communication, planning, management, compliance, quality systems, redesign, and even more capital than you expect.
How are you managing these, and do you have a plan capturing the learnings?
Secondly, consider your tribe. Since the crowd sourcing, the social feed has pretty much fallen away.
This is understandable as there is so much going on to deploy the systems. But it is vital to have regular communication updates sharing your progress.
At least once a fortnight, share where you are at, what has been done in the past two weeks, what is planned for the next two weeks, the challenges and what you have learned. This keeps the tribe informed, includes them in your process, can be a source of inspiration and problem solving and keeps them actively promoting your project.
Vivian Vo
Mentor, Melbourne Innovation Centre
CONGRATULATIONS Geert and team on running a successful crowd-funding campaign. Your pitch is passionately presented with a value proposition that impacts the community from a social and environmental perspective.
Vivian Vo is a mentor for the Pitch a regular feature in the Herald Sun. Picture: Sarah Matray
Preparation has definitely paid off: not only has Farmwall raised its crowd-funding target, the campaign’s wide audience validated the concept.
As a start-up, you are constantly testing, measuring and learning from your customers. Be mindful of the difference between being customer friendly and customer-centric.
Start-ups that are customer-centric spend enormous amounts of energy on providing a solution-based product instead of a product they only think customers want.
Now that you are ready to test your product in the market, the biggest challenge will be determining whether the product is leading to real progress. Measure progress by using metrics such as customer engagement, customer lifetime value, and cost of acquisition.
These metrics will offer valuable insight into customers and their reactions to your product, and can demonstrate growth and be desirable when pitching to investors.
Learning is the essential unit of progress for start-ups, and validated learning is demonstrated by positive improvements in metrics.
Bruce Hall
Mentor, Small Business Mentoring Service
OCCASIONALLY you come across a product or idea that has the potential to make a real difference.
Bruce Hall is a mentor at the Small Business Mentoring Service.
Not only does the Farmwall significantly contribute to sustainability but also gives restaurants and cafes a real point of difference — something that will delight consumers and give them a story to share.
From a marketing perspective, the framework of a great story is there, but flesh needs to be put on the bones. The website looks great but a lot more copy is needed to increase its reach.
The stories can be around sustainability and the ”journey” of the concept, its evolution, the problems and challenges overcome.
You could include information about how the product can help restaurants and cafes provide a better experience, attract customers and enhance their offerings.
To be found, pages and posts on the site also need to be optimised for search. Page titles such as Produce, Market, Impact and so on should be changed to terms potential customers will be using when searching for information on micro herb suppliers, sustainability and similar subjects.
The chosen phrase then needs to be incorporated into meta headings and copy to give the page “search relevance”.
Finally, I suggest the site header be made “sticky”, and adding a contact number.