Thought for food: online grocery founder Matilda Ho wants to raise understanding of what we eat, not just deliver it
From baby formula to fruit, more and more mainland consumers are starting to buy food from overseas on the internet or through agents as they believe its safer and of higher quality. But the online farmers’ market Yimishiji, a Shanghai-based start-up launched last autumn, aims to support local producers who say their organically grown food is just as good. Matilda Ho, the website’s Taiwanese founder and a former consultant, is also launching a company that invests in startups that tackle global, food-related problems such as food waste, healthy forms of dieting and environmental degradation linked to agriculture.
Why did you change your career path?
Before I started the Yimishiji venture, I worked at the strategic consulting firm BCG for three years advising CEOs on future growth strategies before going to the consultancy IDEO for two years, focusing more on innovation strategy. After five years’ experience, I felt the biggest achievement with consulting is to come up with the most logical solutions for the future. However, it was like you’re a doctor and you give advice for a patient, but you couldn’t see whether they recover because of the medicine or device that you prescribed. You don’t know whether this patient gets healthier again because of you. So I decided to do something myself, something more meaningful. Aside from the fact that I really enjoy cooking, I chose a food-related project mainly because of my two years at IDEO where I basically only worked on food projects. I helped set up organic farms. I also helped farms set up restaurant chains and did a couple of digital marketing projects related to food. During these two years I started to realise how challenging the food system is and how many problems there were that need thinking about and fixing. I felt like I wanted to be contributing to that.