S11E154 Jessica Fong/Common Farms - Microgreens and Mega Dreams: Common Farms' Inspiring Journey

Harry Duran 0:00 - 0:04:

Founder and CEO of Common Farms. Thank you so much for joining me on the Vertical Farming podcast.

Jessica Naomi Fong 0:04 - 0:06:

Thank you so much for having me.

Harry Duran 0:06 - 0:15:

So we've had the challenges scheduling things obviously because of the time zone, but appreciate you being flexible. I'm sure that happens a lot when you're trying to connect with people.

Jessica Naomi Fong 0:15 - 0:28:

Yeah, I think the hardest is North America time and Hong Kong, Asia time. But I'm an early bird, so it's 6am here in Hong Kong and that works fine for me as well.

Harry Duran 0:28 - 0:34:

And just to set some context for the viewers and listeners, it's 4pm where I'm at right now. So you're in the future right now?

Jessica Naomi Fong 0:34 - 0:38:

Yeah. Where about are you right now?

Harry Duran 0:39 - 0:58:

I'm in Minnesota, in the Midwest. So we're an hour behind Eastern Standard Time. But it's something I'm still getting used to because I grew up in New York and I've lived in California, so more used to city life. So life circumstances just brought me. So it took some getting used to.

Jessica Naomi Fong 0:58 - 1:00:

And another time zone as well.

Harry Duran 1:00 - 1:41:

Yeah, so heard you speak. It was the indoor tech conference. A lot of it start to sound that, you know, similar. So there's Han obviously, which is coming over, I guess Indec and I believe Chicago. And you know, it's hard to keep up with everyone that's doing interesting stuff in the space. And so that's why that conference is helpful to see, you know, what's happening on a global perspective. And so it was exciting to hear a little bit of your story, but I knew that little bit that you covered on stage was not the whole picture. And I definitely love long form conversations and I'm excited to come in and share your full story here. But just regarding the conference, was that your first time at Indoor AgTech and what was the overall conference experience for you like?

Jessica Naomi Fong 1:41 - 3:53:

t the proof of concept end of: 2019

Harry Duran 3:54 - 5:06:

started the podcast in early: 2020

Jessica Naomi Fong 5:07 - 8:18:

Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, I think with, with a lot of people and it might be a psychological, human thing. Once you pass the hard times, you generally don't remember precisely how you got it done. But it's usually people who's like, oh, do you remember this time? Like, do you remember, like, you did this? And so actually earlier this week, one of our early interns came in and came to our new farm and just to catch up because he was in town and he was going to do a short internship and he was studying in Toronto at that time in biology. And so because of COVID so everything went online and so he ended up staying put in Hong Kong. He was just supposed to be a few months intern and it turned into a full year. And, you know, he was there during the pretty hard days of, you know, just trying to figure out what the business is going to be. There was only a few key elements that I knew Hong Kong didn't have. Agriculture industry. We're importing 99% of the food we consume here. Quality is very different from the time you harvest and the time you consume, especially when food has transported for so long, especially for fresh produce. And we have a decent amount of customers locally who are willing to pay high prices for high quality. That was basically all I knew. And I thought this was a good enough opportunity to just give it a shot. And so this intern of ours, you know, he was just reminding me, like, Jess, did you know, I don't know if you remember, but like, you know, because he saw our farm now, our farm is now 10,000 square feet. And he was like, I don't know if you remember, but like, almost nothing really grew properly in our farm. Like, it was never consistent. We have something called the bronze fennel now. We have like a full row of them and it's very lush in our farm now. But he was like, I remember we had like literally two pieces that you told me to still harvest for one of your customers. So, you know, he reminded me and now I got like flashbacks. I'm like, oh, yeah. Like there were weeks where, you know, I was right before I got into the farm. I'm just hoping that there's no flooding from our irrigation system and didn't have to mop up the floor. I mean, there were just a lot of these things. And I think at that time it was partly stubbornness and just wanting to prove myself. And I thought the mission I had for myself, which was not very well articulated at that time. It was just inside of me. I thought that was meaningful enough for me to keep going. And I just wanted to put everything I got, all my energy effort into one thing that was meaningful enough for me and just give myself the best shot to make it happen. And then it was just going through day by day and then you just become a machine and it's just get the orders out, harvest this, harvest that, you know. And I think Covid in hindsight has been the silver lining where, you know, there just wasn't much else to do other than just stay focused and work.

Harry Duran 8:19 - 8:37:

So that's such an interesting story because everyone has a different experience. And you mentioned a word there, this idea of being stubborn. Is that something like if I were to talk to your parents, is that a trait that you've always exhibited as a child or growing up, this ability to like persevere or just, maybe even just being stubborn? Just you got to keep going until you figure something out.

Jessica Naomi Fong 8:38 - 9:48:

I think if it's in the things that I really believe in and I'm passionate about, yeah, like nothing's stopping me. And then obviously you have a good group of support network, but at the end of the day, you know, it's your business, you're in full responsibility. So, you know, you're lying in bed at night and you know, you're running through things and it could get lonely and but partly is, you know, my team, it was just one person or it was half a person because they're just part time. And you know, my responsibility to that person would drive me my responsibility to the customers. But very early days, the customers were a huge driver to why I just kept going. They were just extremely supportive. I knew it was very inconvenient to order from us. In the early days, we had very specific times for delivery. We had limited products, limited quantities. It made no rational sense for any of the customers to buy from us, but they did. And they order from us every single week consistently. And that helped us grow, that helped me grow, that help us get better and that drove the business.

-: 10:21

So let's rewind the clock back a little bit. Cause I'm curious. You know, the great thing about this industry is that everyone's coming at it from a different perspective, from a different background. And there's maybe now, but I think years ago there weren't university programs in vertical farming. So everyone's sort of learning as they go. So like walk us through like the origin story of common farms and how you came up with the concept and then maybe even like what you were working on before and as everything led to, you know, putting this idea together.

Jessica Naomi Fong: 10:22

Yeah, sure. So right before I started Common Farms, I was in the restaurant industry. I was working with an Italian chef here in Hong Kong. I helped him grow from one restaurant to seven different businesses within one and a half years. And that range from high end restaurant to casual dining, to retail and wholesale distribution. So because we did that, I got access into the behind the scene of the food system. So we were traveling to Italy probably about four times a year. You know, we would fly into Milan, drive all the way down to Puglia, and then we would be hitting all the producers, so. Producers, everything from wine, cheese, caviar, tomatoes, salad greens. And I grew up in Hong Kong and Shanghai, so I never had any experience of growing produce or a backyard garden, you know, even just growing herbs. So all of this was very new to me. And understanding seasonality, I didn't realize. So I was 24 at that time. I didn't understand food seasonality. I didn't understand tomatoes were grown during the summertime in Italy during this certain period. So it was mind blowing. And then I love talking to the farmers. It was just so real and raw, like there is no BS when you talk to them because there's no time for bs. So it was during then that I started to understand more about the food system and what food quality means. And on weekends I would be working in the kitchen because I wanted to learn about the operations. So I'll spend, I'll be doing a lot of the mise en place, so doing a lot of the food prep. And that's when I start receiving all the produce that I would be ordering. And you know, right off the bat, you open the bag, 10% of arugula you have to throw in the trash because they spoil during transport. And then throughout the week, more and more you have to throw out. And because I was working more on the back end operations, so I knew how much everything was. I'm like, that's another dollar, another dollar, another holy shit. And that is $100 right there, just, you know, thrown out. And on top of that, I knew the cost of transporting. And so having all of this, it was just numbers running through my head. And I just thought, there's gotta be a better way to do this or better way of transporting, sourcing, whatever it could be. There has to be something a little bit better than this. And my family was in manufacturing, so I also understood how intensive product or production, any kind of manufacturing is. And I didn't want to get into that space. So I was pretty reluctant. Like, I'm not going to go into food production. I'm not going to go in like real agriculture. But when you distill to the core of it, I had to get to the production. Because if we want to change anything in the food system, we have to own part of that source of production. We had to be the ones responsible to make the decisions of the inputs. So where the soil's coming from, the formulation of the soil, what kind of water are we using? The seed that we're getting from, who's the supplier that we're getting from, where are they getting from? Is it organic, is it not organic? The packaging of the produce, are we going to harvest it? Not harvest it, where the product mixes. So all these, like, miniscule decisions actually really matter to the experience, to the products, for the customers. So I had to get into production. Then it was figuring out how to grow anything. What should I grow, where should I grow, what's the system to use? And because of Hong Kong, notoriously expensive for space, scarce of space. So, you know, There are some YouTube videos and there's some information about indoor farming, vertical farming. And so that was the route that I ended up taking. But, yeah, learning about a lot of it, to be honest. It really started on YouTube and then it was, watch this and then try and do it right away. We had a couple of chefs as our customers initially, and they would be asked, they would send a laundry list of, oh, do you have this crop? Do you have the lemon thyme? Do you have the corn flour? And I had no idea what most of these things were. So just Google search it and I'm like, yes, I do. And then look for a seed supplier, order that and then just try and grow it. So that was really the start.

Harry Duran: 15:05

Wow, what a story. And just that sort of like figuring things out. I think the analogy that people like to use is building the plane on the way up. It's like, because, you know, the fact that you're going to YouTube to get a lot of this information is helpful and. But it's almost like on demand learning. And I think the fact that you're resourceful enough to know that it's better, you don't want to say no. Because if you, the minute you start saying to no to one or two of the crops or the produce, they'll be like, well, then I can't rely on her. And so this idea of just saying yes and Then I'll figure out how to do it. Really does a quick experience for you also to figure out and understand the market. Because I think a lot of the challenges farmers have in this space is maybe they're good growers, but they're not good business people to build the relationships. And it sounds like that was an important strategy. Obviously, you know, Hong Kong, lots of high end restaurants. I'm sure that was part of what helped this model as well. But can you talk a little bit about the importance of building those relationships? Because you said you started to have these conversations with these chefs and I think you understood probably from working in a restaurant yourself, how important it was to connect with those decision makers.

Jessica Naomi Fong: 16:11

Yeah. So in such a high density city, competition is high. So our competitors are not the local producers or other farms in Hong Kong, it's the importers. So what that means is we have the rest of the world who are producing fresh greens, and we ended up focusing on microgreens because, you know, of the short production cycles, the amount of space that's needed is much smaller. We don't have the luxury of a backyard in Hong Kong, we barely even have the luxury of a balcony. So every corner, every dollar, every cent counts here. And in Hong Kong, businesses cycles very quickly. So you can see a restaurant that open for nine months or within a year and then they close, a new one would come by. And this is pretty common in Hong Kong because it's just a very competitive market. And so, you know, just within the environment that I'm in, I just knew if we're going to do something, we have to be thinking of it as a business. So even though I am dibble dabbling with the growing side, I need to be thinking about the market side very early on. And because it's great if we can grow something, but if no market wants it, no one's going to buy at the price you want to sell it at. It's almost irrelevant what you can grow, develop and produce. So microgreens is not specialty greens and edible flowers is not something that most people know about. Even chefs, like a lot of them don't have a full understanding of it, especially local chefs, because we just never had the opportunity to learn about it. And so it required a lot of education for myself as well. So it was finding the right target customer. And so the way we've been doing it was always finding that customer knowing exactly what they want and being able to give them what they want and then develop the product together with them. That way we know Whatever we grew, we had a customer that we're growing for. So there's a real purpose for it, versus just growing the produce and then hoping for the best that someone's going to buy it. So we were very methodical about that. But then again, we had to test the market. Do people want microgreens? What microgreens do they want? How do they want them? What's the crop diversity? How much diversity do we need? What's the price point? And then also, do people believe growing locally is going to be a more premium product compared to the imports? Because Hong Kong was so strongly on supplied from outside, Premium products are coming from Japan, Europe. So if we're growing locally, are they going to be paying more? Would they be willing to pay the premium? There were a lot of these questions we had to figure out, and it was not for us to answer them. It was for us to do something, execute, and then find out the answer from the market. And so that takes time, and that takes a lot of incremental improvements and consistency to get there. And so we started small. You know, most people, my family, friends, they're like, I don't know why you're doing this. I'm not sure where this is going. This is probably one of the hardest. You chose the hardest industry to do in Hong Kong. But I just thought from a customer perspective, if we could grow produce locally and I can get it directly from the source, from a trusted source with people that grow, that care about the produce and the process, I'm going to feel really great as a customer. And that's the supplier, and that's the producer I want to be buying from. And so I created this scenario and this, I guess, the character and that future of the business. And that was the mission. That was the goal for me.

Harry Duran: 20:07

That's so inspiring because I think to your point, you have to wear so many hats, right? And you talk about, you know, you could be growing the most delicious produce there is, you know, tastes wonderfully and that everyone loves. But if you haven't thought about the market and you haven't built those relationships, and so it feels like you're constantly switching hats because you do have to grow something that's delicious and that people want and that tastes good. But you're immediately thinking of, like, where am I going to sell this? Who's going to buy this? And, you know, it's important to build those relationships because it sounds like there was a bit of, like, you know, trial and error. You probably provide some produce to a chef and they'd give you feedback on what they liked, what they did. And so you're constantly reiterating. So when it comes to thinking about how you were going to set this up, you mentioned that you did start small. So maybe can you talk a little bit about where you started and how you started to grow and you know, if you made the decision to build in house or just find partners for where you're at now?

Jessica Naomi Fong: 21:05

Yeah, so because I didn't have an extra room at home and I didn't have a backyard or in the office, so I had to look at my bank account, look at how much savings I had, and then go and rent a space. So we started off in a 200 square foot space. I was working with some of my elementary school classmates just to start it up. And that was when we start looking at, okay, what's the system we need to use? What are we growing? So we rented out a 200 square foot space, extremely small, extremely expensive. It was about a thousand US dollars a month in rent. Right off the bat, like no room for error. But growing and learning about plants and having no experience, had to have room for errors because we were trial and erroring. And so right off the bat we had that cost, but we needed a space. And I think part of it, when you have that pressure, it makes you move faster, it makes you certain decisions quicker. So we started off there. We got a space out in an outer island in Hong Kong. So what that means is we had to ferry into the mainland, which is where most of the restaurants are. And so early days it was getting friends, doing deliveries myself, harvesting, doing invoicings, just doing the whole nine yard and more. And it's not easy and it absolutely makes no rational sense to have done any of it. But we had to do it to start building the business model, because there wasn't a business model like what we were thinking. And I didn't want to do a plug in the system where we produce and then just sell to retailers because I saw other farms that have failed that did that. Especially growing in Hong Kong because the retailers take too much of a margin. They basically own your business and you don't get a say. You don't get to price out your products. You don't get to decide what to grow. And we didn't want to be in that position. The great thing about starting from scratch is you get to make the calls because you're pretty much irrelevant. No one really needs you. You get to fly under the radar and just build and create Whatever you want, and then you just test it and then see if it works. So, you know, we were irrelevant to everyone and. But we just go. We literally went customer by customer. And it was all through word of mouth. You know, a chef worked in this restaurant. He worked with our produce. He loved it. He went to the next restaurant and then he brought us and brought us over to the next restaurant, and we became the producer and supplier for them. So that was the early days. And the other thing is, well, how big do we want to grow this? How big could we grow this? And what are the crop types we're going to grow and why should we grow them as well? And how are we going to be different? What's our moat? It's just constantly questions that I didn't have answers for. And the only way to answer them realistically and honestly was just doing the work and executing and then getting the market feedback. So microgreens, specialty greens was the route that we chose to go by because we had to differentiate. And since our competitors are importers, there's no way they could compete with us on the quality, especially when we are growing locally and we have the speed to customer as well. So there were all these little elements that were really important that created the right product and the right business model for us. And then I wasn't too concerned about how big we want to be, but definitely we wanted to scale because when you're in agriculture, scaling is part of the success. And so we just had to figure out along the way. And we knew education was part of it, we knew education was going to cost, so we had to think of ways where we could be creative and manage costs much better without overspending, because we're just a startup and we just don't have that amount of resources to expense.

Harry Duran: 25:20

Yeah. So I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about what the market is like there. You have made reference to some folks that maybe tried this model earlier. And I'm also curious about, you know, you searched upon education. So what is the market like, the people's experience, like indoor farming in Hong Kong? What's the history of it there? You know, obviously there's people that have tried it but have not succeeded. And obviously sounds like you were learning from some of those lessons as well. But there's also an education process because as with all things, even myself, as I got into this industry, I start to pay more attention. Now when I'm in the supermarket, I'm turning over the clamshells and I no Longer buy, you know, leafy greens from California. Like we have a greenhouse grower here in Minnesota. And I'm conscious of it, it's obviously fresher, it lasts longer, all that sort of stuff. But it was an education process for me. So I'm curious, you know, how much of it was you having to educate both your partners and your customer and the opportunities was, yeah.

Jessica Naomi Fong: 26:20

So maybe I can talk about the market side first and then I can talk about the back end, technical side on how like we set up the farm. So on the front end, the great thing is I have to give credit to our customers. You know, they are the high end restaurants, so they do have that prestige. And because we supply, supply to them, then we can leverage on that, oh, we supply to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel or we supply to the Grand Hyatt or we supply to the Rosewood Hotel. And then that gave us leverage to go talk to the next customer. And even just in the broader community base. And we were very targeted for the chef community because that was what I knew and I knew where the problems were and I was able to be very focused on them and I was able to service them very specifically versus a one size fits all. So I really wanted that target niche market and be able to win in that space first. And so because a lot of these chefs have been, you know, a lot of them are Europeans or have worked in the US So they do have a good base knowledge of what these ingredients are. And so in a way, they start educating me about, you know, the crop diversities, what they've used, how they've used it, and you know, what else they're looking for. So that was the first part. And then in terms of the education, then what we had to do was open up our farm to have people come in for the visit and experience it firsthand. And so it was very critical to do it inside Hong Kong. And the proximity to where people are, the convenience of transport was really important. So the locations that we choose is methodical. And I'm able to say you are 20 minutes or 15 minutes away from work, from your restaurant. And that gets them into the farm. And then that's when I can show them and share with them and show them the plants and the crop diversities, how we grow them, what we've built. And then they just get very excited. They're coming up with recipes. And now at times we are working on the menus with the chefs, you know, or they're coming into the farm and then they're figuring out what that next season menu looks like or what the pairing is going to be like. And so we start working with the European chefs mostly. And then now we've been working more with Chinese and local chefs because now they start to incorporate it into their dishes. So, you know, we have one chef that's like, hey, I'm doing this deep fried scallop. Here's the plate. Give me some options. What should I pair with for the flavor? So there's the flavor profile, there's a visual profile, and then on top of that, we have to think about the shelf life for them and then what they're pairing it with, what kind of cuisine, and then what stories the marketing team can tell or what they can write on the menu. There's a lot of these things that's an add on to the product. It's no longer just selling greens, a piece of leaf or a flower. It's the whole experience that they get to get from it. So that's been the experience on the chef side. But because we started selling, you know, microgreens, there's that nutritional element in what we grow. And so we started getting customers calling us, hey, can I buy it? Do you deliver to homes? And we started putting some of our producers online during COVID because I went into the panic mode and I was like, we're just going to try and sell online. But we started having people calling us and say, hey, I read this article, I read this study that micro broccoli has anti cancer bio compounds in it. I like to buy from my mom or someone that is very sensitive to chemical pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and they need our produce because ours are free from that. So then we started getting educated by these customers. Oh, okay. Micro broccoli has all of these benefits. Oh, yeah, great. Okay. Actually people are reading these articles or, oh, they're actually considering pesticide free organic, you know, and then that's. We got educated by these customers. So we go and dig into more of these information and then we try to amplify it. So, yeah, that's the gist of it on the market side, on the education and then the decision making on the system and how to build it. Because I worked in a factory, in a manufacturing plant before, one thing I knew was things break. And when they break, and especially when it's a biological product, you don't have that much time, especially indoors, clean climate control, you don't have that much time to wait for a part to come and then try and fix it. You got to get that done in the next few hours. So I was very adamant that our system has to be simple. I'm not an engineer, so I need to be able to fix it. I need to be able to run down to the hardware store, grab something and be able to get this thing running again or be able to call someone up within the next hour. And this is going to be someone that never worked on our system before and he's able to fix it. So we buy very simple systems, we source, we don't develop the hardware because there's enough of it in the market. And I don't think I can add much more value what's already in the market. And so I'm not going to compete in a game that I don't think I'm going to win in. And so we keep it very simple and it's a no brainer to fix things, to buy a part. It's going to be affordable enough to do it. And so that's kind of how we stuck to it. So. And that since, you know, the very beginning to now where we've obviously upgraded the system, but every part is pretty simple, we can get parts locally, fix it. There's no customized parts in what we do, other than the customization of putting it all together. But in terms of hardware, we don't customize those.

Harry Duran: 32:31

I think what's fascinating is how much you figured out where the lane to operate in that leans into your expertise around because you have the family background in manufacturing, you've got the restaurant experience as well. And as you were talking about having these conversations with your chefs, you know, the fact that they're asking you for your ideas or your suggestions about what to grow or what would pair well, because they know that you have that experience. I feel like it really adds like a whole nother layer to the relationship you're building with your clients. Because it's something that maybe some other, you know, farmers or other farms may not have. They don't have that experience and they haven't. Maybe they're just been growing, but not understanding how chefs think and how they really value planning ahead and really making all these combinations work and what they're doing. Because, you know, having. I worked in a restaurant years ago as a waiter, but it was a pretty nice restaurant. But you can tell like they're about presentation and they're about like the experience for the customer and what that's going to look like. And so they're already thinking ahead to the moment that they lay that plate down like in front of that diner. And it's interesting to have that for you to have that experience so you can, you know, facilitate those conversations and to really. Because you're thinking that as well, because you know that your microgreens are what their diner is going to experience at the end of the day. And so I'm sure that's top of mind for you.

Jessica Naomi Fong: 33:54

Yeah, we're thinking about customers and what that's going to experience is like. And I'm tracking on their social media what gets photographed and, you know, what that experience. And I think not just in, you know, the food industry, not just in the culinary world, but in every industry now, it's just really about the experience, and we gotta keep up with it. And, you know, things are moving quickly. People have options, so we gotta stay ahead and, you know, not predict, but actually know what people want and be able to give it to them before they even know it. Like, that would be great. We don't always get it right, but that's why we always have to be in the market talking to the chefs, understanding what they need and trying to meet their needs and bringing value to them, not just in just the produce. I don't think, you know, everyone can grow the leaves, obviously, to the quality, to the expectations that will be different. But, you know, everyone can. We get asked like, oh, so can I do this at home? Like, yes, sure. You can definitely do this at home. You know, I started at home, you know, just with one pot, and until, you know, my pot of tomatoes got kicked out. But it's about that consistency. And then once you're able to give a good quality product, people have expectations, expectations go higher. You can't go below what you delivered already. So we got to keep improving and we got to keep making changes, making. But these are small tweaks because once you grow the business a little bit, you can, you know, a few years ago, I could just change out the soil medium, the grow medium, to a completely different supplier or completely different mixture, because the business is not that big to be relevant or have such a high risk now. We just can't do that. So we have to make these. We just. We have to keep tuning it. And sometimes it's not easy because it takes a lot of patience, and you might not have that time for that patience as well. So we're very much customer driven. So we basically pull in what the customer demands are, and then we basically have the production for it. And that's why we get to use indoor farming, vertical farming, as a tool to be able to meet these customers demands and be very precise in targeting these needs and meeting these needs. Whereas, you know, you mentioned traditional farmers. They might just have the capacity to only focus on production because they have a lot to worry about. They have to think about the weather. They have to think about if it's going to rain, monsoon season, typhoon, in our case in the subtropic in Hong Kong. They have to think about the pest problems, the runoffs from their neighbor. There's a lot they need to think about. There is no capacity to think about the market and all these little details. So completely understand and, you know, that's why we had to think about doing it differently. But owning the market, owning the relationship with the customers, I think is key to growing the business. And vertical farming allows us to do that. And because we can do precision, then we can even look into the precision of growing for specific benefits of our target markets, like the nutritional value in microgreens.

Harry Duran: 37:18

I love that you said that you're supporting your customers. I think that's really fascinating concept and this idea that you're looking at the social media to see what people are like, resonating with, sharing. It's like really, they're kind of thinking several steps, kind of seeing what the market is asking for. I think that's a really fascinating and smart approach. So bring us to present day. Like, what does the team look like now? And then, you know, what's on the roadmap for you?

Jessica Naomi Fong: 37:43

Harry Duran: 40:26

So how have you grown as a CEO since starting? You had a trial by fire to get this off the ground. Obviously it wasn't easy. A lot of ups and downs along the way and, you know, it's like you had to learn quickly on the job, right, or else you wouldn't succeed. So I know sometimes it's hard, your accomplishments and as an entrepreneur as well, sometimes I'm just so focused on what to do next. But, you know, when you do, Paulo, and look back, you know, you look back at what you've accomplished since starting, how do you think, you know, you would look back and see how you've grown as a leader and a business owner?

Jessica Naomi Fong: 41:00

Well, still got a long way to go, but gotta count some of the wins as well. And, you know, the blessings that I've had, you know, one is early days. And one of the things that I had in mind and my goal before I had a team, I think before we were even really a business, was I can't wait to hire the first person because I was doing everything alone and, you know, it was pretty lonely while we're. You're trying to figure it out. And then when you start hiring people, you have to learn how to communicate with the team and, you know, learn quickly how to phase out from. And I had a lot of great learning from that, and I had to learn quickly because I wasn't great at initially building the team and how to bring people together and then even, you know, fundraising, talking to investors, how to everything had to be learning on the go. You mentioned building the plane while it's ascending. It was more like building the plane while descending, if anything.

Harry Duran: 42:04

That's true.

Jessica Naomi Fong: 42:05

You know, you have the speed of gravity pulling you, so you have gravity pulling you and you know, so the speed of learning accelerates. We've got a long way to, I've got a long way to go. But you know, I think the more I build, the more confidence I get, then the more focus I get and the more excited I get and the excitement, the momentum we get to enroll more people to want to be part of this and you know, the credit goes to the team and goes to our customers, goes to my advisors just for being there, like on the get go. I knew this was something I wanted to build. That was beyond me. So I knew it was not going to be a one man band. That means the pie has to be split in terms of hopefully the responsibilities, but also the credit to them as well. And it's an ongoing learning process. But I think one thing for sure is you learn a lot about yourself and what you're capable of, where your weak points are, where you should get better at. And so yeah, it's great learning. I'm still really enjoying it.

Harry Duran: 43:10

Yeah, sounds like definitely be ongoing for you. So what's a tough question you've had to ask yourself recently?

Jessica Naomi Fong: 43:18

What's a tough question? Well, I think it relates back to what I just also said and it's a lot of the internal conversations is because a lot of the building and visualization of the business is internal because sometimes you just don't know what to share sometimes. And so then the question is like, well, how much of the pie am I willing to split and being able to come to terms with it because it's so personal. I am common farms. Common farms as me for so long. But once you start rolling more people into it and which was the goal then, you know, maybe like mentally just not ready or you know, letting go of certain things and real and also even realizing, oh, this is not my responsibility anymore. And one of the ones that hard but also very easy for me to answer was, all right, how much of the company am I willing to give away or yeah, for the return of having more people be part of this and for us to be able to do more and do better. It was a very easy answer. It was, I'm willing to Give as much as I possibly can for the right people to be part of this, for the right partnerships, but also making sure I'm making the right decisions to bring in the right people to be part of it. And sometimes there's an internal conversation like, Jess, you know, you gotta let go of this part. It's okay. Because so much of the beginning was, you know, you're on your own, you're building this, and you cannot rely on anyone else because it's no one else's responsibility. So that was the vulnerable question I had to answer. But, yeah, it definitely helped, like, my mental space for how. Where we should go.

Harry Duran: 45:13

Yeah, it's not an easy conversation. And anyone who's had a business or that's growing or is trying to raise some money, those are tough conversations to have because it's. At the end of the day, it's your baby. It's something that you started, you know, that will forever be connected to you. And to make tough decisions about how much of it to part with, who to trust. And it does get lonely. And I definitely can relate to that aspect of it because at some point, you know, you just. You don't know who you can talk to about every, you know, what's going on in your head. And so it's important to have advisors or people that you trust or people that you can bounce ideas off, because if not, you know, just even speaking from experience, if it's stays in your head too much, it's. You start to, like, feel like you're talking to yourself.

Jessica Naomi Fong: 45:53

Yeah. And I make wrong decisions because I make certain assumptions or I make. I delay things in doing because I'm running this conversation that makes absolutely no sense in my head. But it makes sense in my head. Yeah, it's. Yeah, that's a real learning for me.

Harry Duran: 46:10

Jessica Naomi Fong: 46:42

Well, I think at the, you know, we're still in early stage, we're still building. It's not easy because we're always just focused on what we're doing. And every market is very different. You know, it makes a lot of sense to do, you know, large scale greenhouses or smaller individual vertical farms locally in the US Whereas in Asia we have a different model. But you know, we can't do this alone. So you know, we really welcome anyone that's developing anything to, you know, reach out to us. We're constantly in the experimental stage, which means like, because we're always incrementally making improvements and so we can't figure all of this out on our own. But one thing that we're very focused on is looking at the nutritional value in our produce. And you know, that goes international for everyone that's growing fresh produce for the local community. So I think if we could be able to come together, you know, with whatever research and not feel like we're competing with each other, but be able to just share and be able to produce in a bigger way of better quality food and freshness and the time you harvest to the time you consume is very critical and you know, the shorter the time the better without all the constant fluctuation of temperature and climate. So I love to, you know, connect with people that are, you know, doing something interesting and you know, that's really focused on the nutritional value or how we can increase the nutritional value of the produce and you know, how we can bring it more to the market.

Harry Duran: 48:32

Jessica Naomi Fong: 49:34

Yeah. So, you know, all our social media is at Common Farms. And then, you know, out to me on link. My name is Jessica Naomi Fong also, I think that's the name for all my social media as well. And yeah, I love to connect with more people. You know, I think we have the real opportunity to build something meaningful and so. And none of us can do it alone, so. And credit to you for, you know, putting this podcast together and, you know, sticking with it for having it four years now, I believe. Or is that years? And truth be told, some of those lonely nights in the farm where I'm just sewing trays are harvesting. I do listen to your podcast and, you know, these conversations do keep some of us going, you know, in the low times, like just not feeling alone. So thanks to you.

Harry Duran: 50:27

Well, that's important. Yeah. And it's the nature of podcasting that you can do it almost anywhere, and especially if you know you're doing it somewhere where you can have something on in the background. And I don't know if I thought about that when I started, but a lot of farmers, it's helpful for a lot of farmers especially who have, you know, like you said, long days. So I appreciate that feedback.

Jessica Naomi Fong: 50:50

Yeah, thank you.

Harry Duran: 50:52

Thanks, Rita. I really appreciate it.