Marcus Richards
Farm in the city is a “new concept” brand. An innovative food, tools & equipment company, offering grow-your-own & make-your-own solutions to Urban Farmers.
Our mission is to empower, facilitate and support our community to produce, process, package & present a wide range of home-made foodstuffs, in a sustainable and environmentally friendly manner.
We aim to become a globally recognized and loved brand, making the most of the worldwide trend of producing organic food locally, utilizing modern techniques and home-grown ingredients.
Our way to do this is to start small over the internet and scale fast via physical stores. Creating local communities of urban farmers and maintaining a sense of company ownership amongst our team, as well as our sense of humor!
Tell us about yourself?
Having spent 20 years of my professional life in the agricultural tools market and home winemaking sectros, I recently turned my interest into the complete process of food and drinks proδution.
Instead of just providing the tools to help cultivate the land or produce wine, we now provide end-to-end solutions, sharing knowledge, raw materials and tools with a focus on small scale Urban Farming.
In fact it was the beggining of the 2007 crisis that made me re-think my business model. I thought of changing to a B2C approach instead of the traditional B2B that I was involved with until then. I also wanted to capitalize on the then emerging social media environment and the internet in general, thus Farm in the City came to being.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
In order to answer to this question, I would need to go back a little more in time when I took over the original family business from my late father. This is what I would say to myself and to other young entrepreneurs.
“Make sure you follow your own dream and not someone else’s, no matter how close they are or were to you”
What problem does your business solve?
Farm in the City encapsulates the food movement, in a revolutionary way. It’s nature’s way, with a twist. It offers freedom, choice, quality and convenience, compatible with modern urban living.
You don’t have to leave the city and move to the countryside to be able to produce your own natural and healthy foodstuffs. With Farm in the City, you can do it from your own home. You don’t have to rely on someone else to deliver fresh food to your door. Now you produce it on your own!
What is the inspiration behind your business?
We bring long forgotten grandmother knowledge back to life. We provide the means: videos, educational booklets, tools and raw materials, so that we all can become Urban Farmers.
Join us and experience the satisfaction of Producing, Processing, Packaging and Presenting a wide variety of homemade foodstuffs and their by-products. Farm in the City enables you to:
• Realize how easy it is to become an Urban Farmer.
• Become a specialist on various food & drinks making techniques.
• Enjoy home produced safe foodstuffs.
• Adopt a healthier lifestyle & diet.
• Help the environment by producing & sourcing food locally.
Key products are our very own branded DIY KITs. Grow your own seed KITs, winemaking, beermaking, cheesemaking, honey & wax making, soap making KITs, you name it, we have it!
What is your magic sauce?
A farm has certain undisputable values. The land, nature, the fresh ingredients, home-grown produce, traditional practices and a bit of grandma’s cooking, with her secret recipes passed on from generation to generation. A farm is about nature-respecting mentality, a simple, self-sufficient, sustainable lifestyle.
Farm in the City brings the farm and all of these qualities to your home, your kitchen, balcony or terrace. It’s a seemingly contradictive idea, a unique concept, an alternative way of life, but we made it happen, just for you. Now you can have the best of both worlds.
“Farm in the City” is the key. Be creative, make something from scratch, feel proud with achievement, live healthily and combine urban living with natural living.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
We belong to variety of markets. We feel at home in Home & Garden, we feel creative in Food & Beverage, and we enjoy our presence in Lifestyle, Leisure & Hobby!
Being a UK company, operating from Malta with a manufacturing base in Greece, we consider ourselves truly Europeans. Garnering know-how and traditional local wisdom, we focus on creating a company to cover a wide range of activities to satisfy the farm-to-table needs of today’s urban generations.
Millennials wish to consume natural, superior quality products of which they know exactly how they were produced. They also want to find ways to produce them by their own means and “return to nature”, to the traditional ways of the past.
We address the whole world, since the inherent flexibility of our product range allows us to address country-specific tastes and traditions. For example, salmon smoking KITs for the Swedes, kraut fermenting KITs for the Germans and even sake making kits for the Japanese!
Farm in the City is currently evaluating the possibility of establishing a physical presence in Europe and, soon, the world, through a chain of wholly-owned flagship stores. To this respect, we welcome investor enquiries and collaboration proposals.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Every start-up venture needs to burn cash in its initial stages and Farm in the City is no exception to this rule.
Moreover and since our business involves the movement of physical goods we have extra capital needs (raw materials etc) compared to technology startups, who usually only need to support the founding team wages.
Securing this much needed cash in the midst of the global recession of the last decade has indeed been a challenge.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
Albeit haveing a vey clear view of our product line, we will definately need support in developing products with traditional flavours in the various countries that we plan to launch Farm in the City.
Thus, we welcome local knowledge and long forgotten recipes that we could reproduce with our ingenious make-your-own DIY kits.
Stay safe and enjoy locally produced drinks and foodstuffs!
