It's been a busy year after raising funds on Chuffed to launch their Melbourne operations last October. Now in Sydney and in an employee & urban space experiment with Mirvac, we checked in with Farmwall on what's happened since the crowdfund, and here's what co-founder Serena Lee had to say."We completed the crowdfund on the 5th of October 2017. So almost spot on 1 year ago! I can't believe it's been a whole year. A lot has happened. We now have five Farmwalls in the market, including our interstate expansion to Sydney:
We have branched into broader urban farming solutions (small-scale urban farms to activate under utilised space). Cultivate is a good example of this. It's an experiment between Farmwall and Mirvac, in the basement of the sustainable building, EY Centre at 200 George Street, Sydney. Employees & building occupants tend the farm, hold meetings there, eat the produce as well as take it home. We also supply produce to local cafes like Avenue On George, who literally can get food from farm to plate in a couple of minutes. (Avenue On George food plate shown above.)In terms of the biggest positives and biggest negatives of our first year, the positives are definitely the exciting new partnerships with restaurants, cafes, corporates and businesses like Mirvac who are looking to use their assets differently as the way we live and work changes. The reception of Farmwall for different markets has been amazing, including a huge interest for educational tool in schools and universities. We are also exploring a residential and the home model of Farmwall. The only real negative is knowing where to focus and align our interests to achieve highest impact while also running a sustainable business (in commerce as well as impact), but that's a good problem to have.The initial perceived business opportunity has changed a little as we originally envisioned Farmwall only in cafes and restaurants. There is definitely a huge opportunity for Farmwall in the workplace and among unused spaces in large commercial and residential buildings. The experiment with employees at Mirvac who are using the Farmwall as a self serve - garnishing their own lunches & taking home fresh produce from their workplace is working well. We are definitely going to explore this market further. In terms of geographic expansion plans, at this stage we have only added Sydney, but there is high demand for what we are doing all across Australia and we constantly get enquiries from the UAE, USA and South East Asia. We have been really encouraged by market response as we simply and easily solve some of the biggest challenges in food service industry. From a produce production perspective, we redefine locovarian and offer sustainable urban agriculture, zero food miles, zero packaging waste, pesticide and chemical free. We are a realistically inexpensive way of growing super fresh food in a very small space, which from an environmental conservation and accessibility viewpoint, you don't get much better than that.That's one of the reasons we are keen on sharing the food service experience - education and raising awareness about urban farming everywhere we can."