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.
Which kind of consumers are you targeting?
We have two kinds of target consumers. The first are those who have experience overseas, who are maybe very aware of food safety and health and nutrition issues. The second segment are families with young kids who really care about their food source and its quality. Because of this we use a lot of different ways to make sure the quality of our products is right. For example, we send our food journalists to farms to see their farming methods. The farmers cannot use pesticide or chemicals. And then we send their vegetables to testing facilities to make sure that they are pesticide free and chemical free. We publish that report on our website, too.
How do you and the farmers divide revenues?
We don’t have a single purchasing price and then mark it up high to get a really high profit margin. Instead, we benchmark the market price compared to other high-end grocery websites. We share the profits with the family farmers that work with us. We do so because we want to reward farmers who are willing to have the risk of zero yield to be able to continue to support this organic project. Vegetables, fruit and meat, they’re all different. But generally, for our produce, we share 60 to 75 per cent of the revenue with the farmers. We take the rest, which covers losses during transportation, marketing, branding, packaging and delivering from farm to the door.