This little company is taking food subscription services to the next level.
In the past few years, demand for different food subscription services has totally blown up. You can order groceries online, little boxes filled with snacks for you to sample, or even boxes filled with ingredients and recipe cards meant to help you make your dinner without any of the thought or supermarket trips that go into conceptualizing a dish.
Now, however, a company called Mandala da Montanha is totally changing the game. Founded by Martin Schneesche and Alexandre Yokoyama in 2015, the company is based in Santo Antonio do Pinhal, which is a mountain range in Brazil that boasts a high level of biodiversity,
What is the company, exactly? Why, it's a subscription service that allows customers to actually "own" a piece of their farmland and therefore enables you to eat all of the organic produce on it that you want for a monthly fee.
"Being a little farmer sucks sometimes, because most people think that a lettuce head is always the same, which it is not. And you are crushed by the distribution channels: They are only focused on price and aesthetic standardization. Distributors only want pretty vegetables, and always with the lowest cost possible. So we decided to sell directly to our clients, who value our products," Schneesche told Munchies.
Basically, for $80 per month, subscribers can let Schneesche and Mandala know what kind of seeds they'd like planted on the plot that they buy. Mandala has a team that then grows these crops for the client, and the paying customer gets their food delivered to their door every week!
Seems like a pretty sweet set-up to us; consumers have much more agency in which ingredients will be grown and delivered, and also get to know exactly where and how their food has come from the farm and to their kitchen.
"We wanted to be ‘co-producers, more than just ‘producers,’ by allowing people who can’t produce their own food -- whether they live in the city, or because they don’t have enough space, or because they don’t have time, or simply because they don’t know how to do it -- to actively participate in the production of their own food," Yokoyama told Munchies.
What do you think of this innovative business plan?