Vertical Farming & Server Rooms in Modified Shipping Containers

Tom Oberlin, entrepreneur, world traveler, out of the box thinker with three decades or business management, calls in from Brazil to provide insight on how he’s building sustainable businesses with modified shipping containers—vertical farming and energy efficient mobile server rooms. Click on in and listen to some amazing success stories, learning moments, and how to turn business challenges into profitable solutions. Tom Oberlin, a truly remarkable business visionary.
  

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Transcript

[Upbeat theme music plays] 

[0:00:02] Female Voice:  Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here is your host, Taylor Martin!

Taylor Martin:  Hello! This is Taylor Martin. I am so excited today because today I have an old colleague of mine… Actually, he was a client of mine many years ago when I was living in D.C. He was doing something with shipping containers. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, “shipping container- probably an architect. Doing something novel with that." But that was not the case. He was doing mobile server rooms so that companies could have servers in modified shipping containers so they can move them around as the company moves around. And I thought that was just genius back then and I'm talking, like, 15 years ago. It's been a long time! I was always awestruck by Tom. Tom Oberlin is our guest today. He's just a very business-minded thinker. Creative. Always coming up with new ideas. And I just really enjoyed working with him and being around him and just being next to his vision. Communicating and working for his company was great but being next to him and learning and watching and observing was a great asset for myself; seeing somebody that has taken something that no one's done before and bringing it to fruition. So, I… I wanted to reach out to Tom to get him on the show. And low and behold, I reach out to him, and he is doing something else with shipping containers! So, I was like, "Tom, you have got to be on this show! Don't say no. Don't say no. Let's get you on!" And he was nice enough to say, "Yes. Yes. Yes. I'll be on! I'll be on! Okay." So, without further ado, I want to introduce you to Tom Oberlin of Mighty Greens. He is creating indoor farming, if you will, green farming of mighty greens, in modified shipping containers. I just find that completely amazing. Tom, please tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to be in this position. How did you get here?

Tom Oberlin: Well, first off, I hope to live up to 1% of your expectations here. That build up was... 

Taylor Martin: [Laughing]

Tom Oberlin:  It leaves me humbled. I really enjoyed working with you back when we were getting Smart Cubes started in maybe 2008-timeframe. So, around that time frame when I was first starting to think about it. I have been a person who has always worked with things that I thought would be something interesting in the future. You know, when I was a young person, I worked in wireless cable television before cable TV existed and then worked for the first company that got a direct broadcast satellite license. You know, I happened to be the 20th person to go to work at America Online when it was still a Commodore computer only based service, you know, in the mid-90s. Helped launch a wireless mobile data service in the Washington D.C. area that was a project backed by Paul Allen. So, I guess I've always had this nose for things that I thought were going to be... Well, they were going to work, right? And I didn't always hit on the… at the right time in the marketplace, but all those things I got involved in, at some point, became useful. Because I… You could see they had some utility to it. 

I worked in the traditional data center business in the early 2000s. Part of a team of people that built 3 massive data centers, all in Latin America- 2 in Brazil, 1 in Argentina. And one of the challenges after the internet collapse, what you realized is that, you know, data centers were built huge with the idea that they would always fill up rapidly. But that meant you have this really large real estate investment that limited the number of people that could have data centers, and you had this really energy cost to maintain that space. And it didn't get efficient until it got 75 or 80% full. And I had been be asked to do a project for the former Minister of Information and Communication Technology in Amman, Jordan. And while I was over there… It's like a picture in my head today. I was standing in a stairwell building, and we were trying to figure out what the demand was in a country where nobody had a data center. If you go to talk to the banks and the pharmacy companies, and all this… Nobody has a clue, right? And then you don’t know how… If you build too big, you'll lose a bunch of money. Build too small, you have to build something again right away to be really inefficient. And I thought, "Why don't we do something modular and scalable?" Something you can get off the ground fast with and that's where I sort of hit on a container-based data center.

Now, I would say hit on it but, in fact, Sun Microsystems had a little project that they called "The Black Box" that was… They were just launching at that point in time. I went back and started looking at that, and I got really enamored with these ideas of modular, scalable systems and how they can be made fast and energy efficient. And so, I went into that area. I arranged a team of engineers from the US and Chile, got a first design with the 3rd company in the world to get a patent on modular data center designs. You know, behind Google and Hallway, and then launched and started building the business. I chose Brazil because I already knew it from my prior experience and knew it was a country that had a lot of opportunity. We felt it had a lot of opportunity and set up business here.

[0:05:07] And then, boy, we… I mean, we won awards for our designs. We built projects for banks. We built projects for the largest mining company in South America. We built projects for computer companies. We were selected… We were the only company in Latin America that was selected by Amazon, and approved by Amazon web services, to build modular data centers for them.

Taylor Martin: Oh, wow! So, you guys did a lot of different work down there. Was it just all in Brazil or was it, you know, other countries in South America?

Tom Oberlin: Between Brazil and Venezuela. Oddly enough, Venezuela! 

Taylor Martin: Wow.

Tom Oberlin: [Laughing] Yeah. Of all places, right? The last place you would think of. We had inquiries from over 100 countries around the world. We got inquiries from all… literally every continent except, you know, Antarctica, right? [Taylor laughing] But, we had inquiries from all over the world. And we did some really interesting design projects and that's what caught Amazon's attention, right? And we were really good at driving down energy costs because, you know, that’s… Brazil has high energy costs. In a traditional data center, just to digress… In a traditional data center, for every $1 you spend on energy to a server, you spend as much as $2 on energy for cooling. And so, we built a system that cut that $2 down to $0.20. And we built other systems that were even more efficient than that. And we did it by making small rooms that you could efficiently cool and putting intelligent systems in that controlled, you know, the movement of water, the movement of fans. We designed systems that used what is called free-air cooling. I really had a team of fantastic engineers that worked on this. I was just the guy saying, "Okay, let's go after this" and "what else can we do better, faster and more efficiently?"  And we happened to get 2 of the 3 largest banks in Venezuela. A really interesting experience with some very complicated projects where we beat out IBM and Dell and some other big companies for the projects.

Taylor Martin: Wow! That's fascinating. You know, like I mentioned earlier… You know, when I reached back out to find you… Because we haven't spoken in quite some time… But when I reached back out, and I saw that you were in… still in the modified shipping container solution business, but you were in food in Mighty Greens. I was like, "What?! What is that?! [Tom laughing] How do you go from high tech to food?" I mean… How did that happen? How did that come about?

Tom Oberlin: It actually all relates back to Venezuela. Bank of Venezuela was our customer. The CIO of the bank became a good friend of ours. We worked closely with him- a fantastic guy- Hernan Garcia. And eventually he left the bank and, meanwhile, his former… The President of the bank was a General and ultimately got appointed to become the Minister of Food because Venezuela was running out of food. It was a really sad case for a country that produced massive amounts of food, destroyed the agriculture industry and the food processing industry and now they don't have any import food.  And so, his former boss was the Minister of Alimentos, as they say in Spanish, and Hernan was standing in food lines 4 to 6 hours a day hoping to buy food. And the other third of the time of the day was spent in line trying to buy medicine. We didn't know the minister well, but we knew the minister's team well. And I said, "What can we do for these people? How can we help them, you know? Can we send shipping containers full of toilet paper there? What can we do?" I started looking, and I happened upon finding some of the early innovators in the container farming business in the U.S. Found some guys producing Leafy Green Machine out in Boston, a couple others, some guys in France who were growing strawberries. I started looking at this and said, "Yeah, man. We can do this!" And the controlled environment part, this is now 2nd nature to us. You know, I grew up on a farm. My co-founder is a vegetarian, but [laughing] we don't know anything about growing vegetables. 

I did some research, and I found a PhD agronomer, who is a college professor here at a federal university in Rio. We went to meet with him, Glaucio Genuncio, and after a couple meetings, we asked him to join, and we co-founded Fazenda Urbana- the company that owns the Mighty Green brands. And so, we got started with that. And you say, well… Okay, now we've got the technical in terms of ag expertise, and we have the technical in terms of production. Now what are we going to do with this? And we spent a bunch of time studying different business models. Are we going to build and sell urban farms? You know, vertical farms? Are we going to do franchise businesses? What are we going to do? And we ultimately decided that we wanted… looking at what provided the most value, what we could do on a scalable basis, and what wasn't available in any sort of form or other in Brazil was to produce microgreens in a controlled environment.

Taylor Martin:  That's amazing. I had no idea it started in Venezuela. So, it started in Venezuela and then you… then you turned your sights on Brazil and said, "We need to, you know, expand"?

[0:09:52] Tom Oberlin:  No. So, the idea was provoked by what was going on in Venezuela. I am… I was, and I still am in Brazil. But the conditions in Venezuela and the human conditions of people that we knew, right? You know, it led us to try to find a solution. Ultimately, the Venezuelans… They didn't have hard currency to even buy the regular food that they needed, right? And at that point in time, every dollar purchased above- if I remember the number- $100,000.00 was approved by the Vice President of the country. And then depending upon whether it was a private industry or a government who was making the purchase, there were 2 different prices- exchange rates- for the local currency. In the end, we took what was provoked by this humanitarian crisis... I mean, 5 million people have fled the country. Violence is out of control. The government officials have their own grocery stores, and they eat well. But everybody else, including this guy who, you know, worked for large government was standing in food lines. So that led us to a solution that then caused us to leave the data center business and say, “You know what? Let's do something that can have an impact, a positive impact, in a lot of different ways.” And we decided to enter in the food production business.

Taylor Martin:  Wow. That's so interesting how life can kinda lead you in different directions, not even knowing it. Like, you think you're going to do this… And you were doing the servers and the solution and then Venezuela showed you this need and then you turned your sights on to Brazil. You moved your business over to that and now you are farming in containers. That's just crazy!

[Both Laughing]

Tom Oberlin: Well, I remember the day that our cofounder, Rodrigo, who worked directly with me at Smart Cube, you know, he said, "You know what? We're going to go do this other thing, right? We're going to shut this down and go do this other thing because we just think it makes a lot more sense and has a lot more beneficial impact on the world."

Taylor Martin: So, let's get technical for a second here. So, you know, if you're growing food in a container… Can you grow it a lot faster than you do in traditional farming? Because, I mean, you have everything so controlled, right?

Tom Oberlin:  Yeah. You understand technology and the… and the sort of logic behind it, and that's exactly right. The beauty of controlled environment agriculture is that you eliminate the variability that occurs in nature. You know, you don't have exceptionally sunny and hot days followed by heavy rains followed by freezing cold. Because every day is a perfect day and if you segment the production of the plant into the different natural stages of the plant, right? Germination and then the microgreens stage and then the full life cycle plant stage… You can create the proper lighting conditions now using LED lights, temperature, and humidity conditions, and in adult plants, nutrient conditions with hydroponics, which has come an amazingly long ways in 30 years. So, you can create everything perfectly for that plant. And that means that you don't have these risks of losses and production. You don't have shorter than longer production cycles depending on the temperature. You substantially reduce the risk of insects. And if you do your job right, you can throw all the fungal problems that also exist in nature. 

Taylor Martin:  Ahhh. 

Tom Oberlin:  And so, your yields are higher. You know, you understand people probably out there at least have a little bit of an idea about hydroponic systems in some sort of plastic or glass greenhouse with rows and rows of hydroponic plants growing one next to the other. Well in a controlled environment, vertical farm, you basically turn one level plane of space into 5 or 10 or more growing areas. So, you also make extremely efficient use of land. That's why people are able to take warehouses in Newark, New Jersey and turn them into massive lettuce production farms.

Taylor Martin:  So, you're like stacking them like servers, you know? Instead of servers, you're just stacking these plates, if you will, of different types of microgreens, you know? But they may not be right on top of each other because you've got to have light and water and all that stuff, but still. 

Tom Oberlin:  Yep. 

Taylor Martin:  So, you're maximizing your square footage or square inch, if you will. That's amazing. But what about the medium? Like, what are they actually growing on? I mean, is it dirt? Is it some sort of composite of coconuts? What is it?

Tom Oberlin:  The answer is… We tested 5 or 6 different types of grow media. In Brazil- in our first phase- we selected coconut fiber. It's in abundance here. Coconut fiber is a hydrophobic product so that means it doesn't retain water, so you don't run the risk of root rot with your plants. At the same time, it allows the medium to secure the roots of the plants. But even that was a challenge. When you talk about, you know, a country that's still developing in some areas.  Brazil has massive amounts of coconut. We drink coconut water here all the time. Fresh coconut water. I can walk, you know, 10 meters from here and grab, literally in this store, and grab, you know, a bottle of fresh coconut water. Here in the streets in Rio, you walk down the street, you can get... They suddenly have a vendor chopping a coconut open, and you can drink water out of the coconut. So, there's plenty of coconut fiber.  But just any coconut fiber structure won't do. And so, we have to get the coconut fiber that's the right thickness and the right density in a uniformity.

[0:15:16] When we started… When we started buying, we tested 3 coconut fiber providers. One of them had some sort of petroleum product he must have been using because there was an oil slick that came out [laughing] of the coconut fiber when I put it in the water. 

Taylor Martin:  Oh my God! 

Tom Oberlin:  Another one made a clean product, but, you know, the difference in thickness... Some of it was transparent, which means when I went to plant small seeds in it, they went right through, and some of it was so thick the roots wouldn't go through it. So eventually, we went to them. We worked with them to develop a uniform thickness coconut fiber product, and once we did that… Once we started doing what we're doing up front, making noise about it, there's a lot of people trying to imitate what you're doing here. But what we did is we would tell anybody who wanted to know that what we were using for Romania, this coconut fiber, where they could go to get it. We'd give them the phone number and encourage them to do that. Because we wanted that coconut fiber provider, and others, you know, not only to exist but to maintain and produce a high-quality product. And secondly, we set up WhatsApp groups of small producers that wanted to produce microgreens, and medium sized and even talking to larger sized, because we knew that microgreens were unknown in this country. Other than high-end chefs that were buying products from small farmers, there was nobody doing anything in a scalable way that would arrive at a consistent product all year long with a consistent price point. And the precursor to that is getting people familiar with the benefits of microgreens, right? That they have up to 40 times as many nutrients per kilo as an adult plant and all these other characteristics. So, we set out to educate. Anybody that wanted to find out how to grow microgreens, we set up groups and we would tell them. We would encourage them how to do it. We went through all the seed providers here, and most people were selling seeds with antifungal, anti-rodent coating that's now been banned in Europe. And so, we had to get seed providers to separate seeds for us before they put them through treatment because we're gonna take the product, we're gonna put it on coconut fiber, we're going to put it in water that's going to be recycled, and then we're gonna to sell it live and ready to eat. And so, we had to eliminate any risk of any pesticide being in the food. And once we did that, we told everybody else where to go get their seeds.

It wasn't easy! We went… The first time we went to a trade show, a big horticulture trade show, with our, you know, co-founder, Glaucio, Rodrigo, and I… We were called idiots! We were told by traditional farmers, "Nobody's going to buy this and “This won't work. It'll never function." I turned to Rodrigo and I said, "Now we know we're on the right track." Because these guys are never going to do it, right? They're never going to try it. They're going to keep planting in the dirt. They're going to keep using pesticides. Brazil is #1 or #2 in the world in using pesticides. They use like 13 kinds of pesticides that are all prohibited, off label pesticides that are used here. I had all these people who did that sort of stuff, and they were telling us, oh, it wouldn't work. Three years later, in the same show, there was a line of people that had traveled from all over the country to meet with us and talk to us, to understand how we were doing and what we were doing because they, too, wanted to do it. 

One of the reasons we started producing microgreens is because Rodrigo and I both had stepsons that at the time were 8 years of age, and neither one of them liked to eat any vegetables. 

Taylor Martin: [Laughing] 

Tom Oberlin:  My stepson, Lucas, you put anything green, yellow, or red on his plate, and he would start screaming, "Mamãe! Mamãe! No!” And, of course, I grew up in a family of German descent, they said, "We put something on your plate, you're going to damn well eat it." Right? And that's not really a great relationship with the kid. We tested out microgreens on the kids, and they would eat them. They wouldn't resist. You’d give them broccoli and I would say, "Well, here's, you know, here’s 5 grams of broccoli, the equivalent of 200 grams of adult broccoli. The first time he tasted it, he went in another room. He's like holding it and looking at it.  Then he finally, unwillingly, stuck it in his mouth, and he tasted it. And then he tasted it again. Then he came back, and I said, "How was it?" And he said, "Oh. Não é tão terrível,” which means, "It's not so terrible. No." 

Taylor Martin: [Laughing]

Tom Oberlin:  From that point on, he would eat microgreens. And so, we said, well, if we're going to grow this stuff for anybody to eat and encourage people to feed their kids, this stuff better be clean. It better be free of pesticides. We came at this from the standpoint that we have to make the best quality product possible. Our aim is to try to get young kids to start, to try, eating vegetables.

Taylor Martin: Yeah. That's something everybody, every parent, wants to do. I mean, I do with my kid as well. I mean, we're always trying to get him to have… to get greens in him.  And we do smoothies all the time. I think he's a little smoothie'd out after about 3 years of doing it, so I gotta get more inventive!

Tom Oberlin: [Laughing]

[0:20:03] Taylor Martin:  You unpacked, like, so much awesomeness in that explanation that I don't even know where to begin. One of the things that you said was that you're selling them live. Is that what you said?

Tom Oberlin: [Laughing] Yes. Yes, I did. The traditional approach with microgreens is to grow them, cut them, you know, put them in a package, and then ship them if it's to a, you know, restaurant or supermarket. And microgreens, unless you spray them with some chemical, have, you know, at typical shelf life- if they're properly refrigerated every step of the way, from the time you harvest them to the transportation, if they go to a distribution center for a store and then out to store and while at the store if you keep them in a 5-to-10-degree centigrade range… You know, you have a 5- or 6-day shelf life. That means that the store has to get it in, probably there's a day in transport in the store, it sits there on the shelf, and if somebody buys it within the 3rd or 4th day, they better go home and eat it right away. Otherwise, you've got a green juice.

You know, we were just doing our testing in the first couple of months, and we had a couple high end restaurants- one of the top 50 restaurants in the world here in Rio- and the chef is a friend of mine. We went to him. The restaurant is called Lasai. And we went to Rafa and we said, "What do you think of this?" And he said, "Tom, you know, I worked in Europe and I worked in the U.S., and I could get live plants, especially in Europe. I could get some live plants. If you bring live plants to me, as a chef… The kitchen is hot like crazy and humid." And he showed me, you know, the cut plants, and these turned… “Literally, I take them out, and there's one day's serving, and if I don't use them all at that time, they'll turn to mush. So, if you bring me live plants, you know, the shelf life is much longer.” I said, "Jesus! I don't have to cut it? I don't have to sit there weighing each individual unit? No. And I can extend its shelf life out of all of this? I'm in!" Went back and that night, literally, the next day, we changed our whole processes.  

But then we had other sets of problems. We had to figure out packaging that would allow the plant to continue to breathe and not get too humid inside the box. We developed our own packaging to do this. And then we had to make sure that all the logistics were done with the right temperature-controlled environments. But that meant that, you know, somebody could buy our product at the store and 10 days later, it was still good. In fact, we did a lot of tests. I had many microgreens, many, that were in the identical condition they left the farm or, at least visually and taste wise and texture wise, 3 to 4 weeks later, in my refrigerator. So, we said, well, microgreens aren't inexpensive, right? You used a lot of seeds to get them. You have a lot of other different costs in there. But we made that switch, and nobody was doing that here. In fact, nobody still... Well, we have a couple small imitators now that are doing it, but they're basically following our methodology. We had to teach them how to do it. Small farmers that are doing it and selling it at farmer's markets. But nobody was doing that, you know, here, and still nobody's doing it on any sort of scale. We have now changed our process and our grow media, and we moved away from coconut fiber to growing on algae. On a gel made of algae. [Laughing] And so… 

Taylor Martin: Wow! Wow! Wow! 

Tom Oberlin: [Laughing]

Taylor Martin: That's awesome!

Tom Oberlin: And all of this came about because of the live plant.

Taylor Martin: So, you're saying, like, another problem came at you… the time frame thing with your chef friend… and then finding the solution for that came with the algae? The algae came out of that?

Tom Oberlin:  No. So, after that...  I mean, we went… No. We used the coconut fiber, which we were already working on. But coconut fiber… You have to cut it.  You have to sterilize it. You have to cut each piece.  You can mechanize that. You have to sterilize it. Well, we started sterilizing it using a waffle iron, right? [Laughing] And then a panini sandwich press because if you put hot water… If you, you know, if you heat the water and turn it into vapor, you can sterilize your coconut fiber. And then we developed a machine to seed this that we're going to patent- a water-based machine. We have a guy that works with us that we call our MacGyver, the Brazilian MacGyver, who can make anything out of anything. And so, we developed all this process, and we said, "But still to be able to scale this really the way I want to, we need even more mechanization." And so, we were looking at different ways to do that, and we wanted to continue to extend the shelf life of the product. And so, we looked at… We came upon, you know, gel-based solutions. My former girlfriend at the time happened to be in the car when I said, "Well, what about this?" And the agronimer said, "Oh, that won't work” and then later we tested it, and it worked like crazy.

[0:24:56] And so now where the process allows us, we're not there yet, but we now know how to do it. To mechanize the whole process, we can put the grow media, pour it directly into the base of the packaging, we can seed it with a machine, we can do whole rows of them at a time, and then we break the production process into 2 stages to further reduce energy cost and increase productivity. We germinate in one room, using a fogponics technique, which we discovered people were using to grow marijuana. And then we move to a second room, which has the lights and so forth. We can do all this with this gel and then the product has survivability even longer than the coconut fiber because the gel is over 99% water. And we eliminate all the hydroponic system, Taylor. What used to be an intelligent hydroponic system, that goes away completely. Our estimate, we used, you know, 97-98% less water than a regular farm. Well, now, we've cut our water consumption by another 80% by doing this. The water goes into the gel and so its evaporation is much slower, right? The shelf life of the plant is longer. Our losses are less, and the gel is consumable. And it's vegan! The whole product is vegan. [Laughing]

Taylor Martin:  That’s amazing! And it seems like you're also bringing your cost down, so I mean… Because I mean… I know microgreens are always a little bit more expensive when I buy them at the grocery store. And I usually buy them when I know I'm going to have a certain type of dish, you know? I'm going to cook it that day or something. But that's here in the States. You know, something like that, I man… How are the Brazilians receiving this? Are they like, "Wow! I have access to microgreens now!" Are they getting behind it? Are they getting educated? Are they wanting it more? Is there a demand? Where is that at?

Tom Oberlin: It's changed a lot. We started by selling to restaurants in 2017 and then we got called by the owner of the largest high-end supermarket chain here in Rio, which is called Zona Sul. His wife and his son met us at a… It's not really a farmer's market, but it's a group that arranges for small producers to present their markets and they have events. And, yeah, they met us there, and we didn't know that she was the, you know, was the wife of the owner of the largest supermarket chain. Then the next event we went to, he came. He looked at the product, and he told his head buyer vegetables to, "Get those guys, and get their products in the store. I want this product in my stores." I had been calling him for 6 months, and nobody would return my call, and then one day I got a call from them saying, "We want to meet you and get the product in the store next month." Right? 

[Both Laughing] 

So, I go, “Okay!”  And so, we finished our packaging, you know… We got everything set up and shifted from our focus from restaurants to supermarkets, which is what we always wanted to do, and then we put it in the stores. In the first delivery cycle, we went to like 7 or 8 stores to get started. We said, "Well, we'll just put it out there and see what happens." So, the first week, we let it out there, and we made some sales in some stores. One store we didn't sell anything and another we, you know, we slowly sold a few. One store we sold nearly everything. Then we started doing taste testings in the stores after that, which we'd always planned to do. And so then with taste testings, we started to drive sales and then we started to drive repeated sales, right? Because you say, "If I do a taste testing and somebody buys it once, but they don't come back then, you know, there's still a problem here,” right? Price point problem. Product problem. Maybe both. We only started with, like, 10 or 12 units per store. Two and a half years later, we had stores that were buying 60 units a week and selling all of them out without any taste testings. And the number of stores increased. And then we started delivering products from Rio to Sao Paulo. It's from, like, you going from Washington D.C. to New York in terms of distance, right? We saw that by doing education, using social media… Certainly Instagram made a big difference. Education. We worked with nutritionists all over to communicate to people, and we worked with chefs, right? And showing people how to use the product was critical. As you said, you used to buy microgreens so you could make smoothies out of it, right? And you can make smoothies out of it, and you use it to decorate a plate. So, we had to show people this could be part of your regular, you know, your normal salad, right? It's one more thing that you make part of your salad, not just to make it look better but, in fact, to increase the nutritional value of the salad.

Taylor, we do events with kids in supermarkets. We found by working with influencers and, you know, chefs, nutritionists, teachers and doing events that we showed people how to make use of this product.

Taylor Martin: That's amazing! I mean, you said you were branching out to other cities. I mean, how is that going? How is the advancement of this, you know, product, technology, and reach?

[0:29:45] Tom Oberlin: Good question! We ran tests, you know, delivering things from Rio to Sao Paulo. You know, we're in some supermarkets in Sao Paulo, but our mission always was to grow locally. And so, we found that, okay… We’ve got a market there, but the only thing that makes sense for us and for the microgreens business is in every major city to have a production center. We were about to implement production in Sao Paulo when we were still in the phase of using the coconut fiber. And we concluded that we didn't want to do that because we knew at that point, we'd already done enough testing on the algae-based grow media that we wanted to migrate to the algae-based grow media. We also knew that we could centralize the planting on the grow media and then ship it to the other cities just to be germinated and grown. And so, we pulled back from that expansion until we get the full-scale algae-based grow media up.

Taylor Martin:  So, that's where you're at right now?

Tom Oberlin: Yeah, and so we're out raising money to do that right now. But what we did do was… So, Taylor, we had a multidimensional, you know, business. We added the geographic expansion plans within Brazil and then we had the product line expansion. Because from the start, we planned to expand from microgreens to mushrooms to strawberries and to tomatoes. And so, what about mushrooms? I walked into the meeting and said, "Rodrigo, what do you think about mushrooms?" "Great!" Now, we had never grown a mushroom in our lives. Never! But they loved the idea. They said, “Okay. Mushrooms. Do it! Get it in here in the next couple months. As soon as possible." So, we had to go out and find a container, a 20-foot insulated reefer container, which is about like finding a unicorn in Brazil. There's plenty of 40-foot containers, 40-foot reefer... Turns out the few that there are cost much more than the 40-foot container because they're so rare. And then we had to figure out how to grow mushrooms in it. 

So, about 9 months prior to that, I got introduced to a Japanese fellow… a fellow of Japanese descent who grew up in South Carolina. Because his family has huge cotton, thread-making and cloth-making factories all over the world… There's a huge one outside of Greenville, South Carolina, and they had a huge one in Sao Paulo. At some point, he had been called to Brazil to take over the family business. But when he was a kid…when he was a college student in Colombia, he was growing… He decided he wanted to love mushrooms. And so, he started growing mushrooms and selling Shiitake mushrooms around the U.S. So, when he came to Brazil, it’s like this damn, you know, this cotton business.  “Okay. I gotta take care of this, but I really wanted to grow mushrooms." And so, he, over time, built the largest mushroom grow media production company in South America. And through a coincidence, you know, I happened to get to know him, and we became friends. And so, when these guys said, "Okay. You know… [Laughing] We want you to grow mushrooms." I said, “Well, we haven't grown it, but I know somebody who has.” And so, we built... We took, in a very short period of time, we found a container that was abandoned. A 40-year-old container that was covered with vines and had been abandoned. A reefer container. We acquired it for about one-third of the cost that, you know, the only one we could find in the country. We reformed the thing ourselves, putting in stands to grow, putting in refrigerations. a cooling system because mushrooms need…. And putting in the same sort of fogponic system that we were using to germinate our microgreens. And this MacGyver guy, Junior, did most of this, right? And we had some help. Rodrigo and I did a lot of painting things, soldering things, and so forth. We walked out one day and said, "Junior, where's the connection to the freshwater supply?" And he said, "There isn't one." And I said, "Why not?" And he said, "Well, I tested the condensation that comes off the refrigeration system. I put a bucket there, and I measured it."

Taylor Martin: No! No way!

Tom Oberlin: “…And I am certain that we will have more than enough water that we need to hydrate the mushroom blocks, you know, the grow media for the mushrooms, without connecting to the city water system."

Taylor Martin:  My mind just went BOOM!

Tom Oberin: [Laughing] Mine, too, when he said this to me. And I said, "Well, Junior, what's your plan B?" And he said, "You knuckleheads always tell me that plan B is to make plan A work! And that's my plan B!"

Taylor Martin: [Laughing] That's awesome!

Tom Oberlin: So, we, you know, like we were running for time, right? We set it up. We took a water tank. We repurposed all this stuff we already had. We made some stands, and it sits in front of the store. You can see a video on our mightygreens.farm website. It sits in between the store and the Avenida das Americas, which gets about 300,000 cars passing in front of it every day here in Barra da Tijuca. And we set it up and got some seeded grow media to grow oyster mushrooms. We put them in, and we prayed, right? 

Taylor Martin: [Laughing] 

[0:34:55] Tom Oberlin:  And we sweated. And a week later, we had mushrooms. So, we have a closed-loop water system there. We don't use any water from the city water system or any other water. The site that we're on- the parking lot- then this is the store... It gets hot in Rio, right? The parking lot has a covered space for the cars. Coverings are all solar panels, right? So, they're using the solar panels to provide shade for the cars and for the electricity for the store, you know, then they sell back. But with this insulated container, we're able to produce mushrooms that normally need to be produced in a cold climate in a humid climate without using any… with using distilled water. And this became really important because last fall, somebody made a mistake in the city water system.  Opened the wrong valve or didn't open the right valve, and a bunch of… a huge… a massive supply of wastewater went into the city water system. And for 2 months here, everybody was forced to drink bottled water because the water was contaminated. The water in our system was never affected by this at all. We were able to continue to produce mushrooms with no contamination whatsoever in that system.

Taylor Martin:  Yeah, that closed-loop system, I mean…. That's the ideal thing that everybody wants because it's self-contained. You don't have to worry about it. It's like when you were doing the server rooms back in the day, you know.  When you guys had a full server room set up in one of those containers… You know, we always talked about how you just liked to put a lock on it because it was, like, quadruple redundancy because humans were the biggest problem.

Tom Oberlin: Yeah! [Laughing]

Taylor Martin:  You know? And it was a closed system by putting a lock on it and done. Keep the humans out, and the server, you know, room just works on its own and has so many backups. This is like that, I mean… That's amazing!

Tom Oberlin: Yep. That changed a bit, Taylor. So, then we said, “Well, okay.” We started dealing with oyster mushrooms and then we started dealing with Shitake mushrooms and then, because we were so effective at communicating to people how to use mushrooms and how to, you know, how to add mushrooms to their diet, we tripled the volume of mushrooms sales in the first store that we went into. What we found is Brazilians have a very low consumption rate of vegetables. On average, they consume 51 kilos per person per year. To give you a reference, the U.S. is around 115. What I found is that you had a large population of parents whose teenage and young adults still live at home, which is common here. And these teenagers and young adults were becoming vegan or vegetarians, and they were insisting that their parents provide vegan or vegetarian food at home. And the parent would show up, or the housekeeper, but the parent would show up at the store and understood that mushrooms were a source of protein, a vegetable or fungus, but a vegetable source of protein. And so, we were educating parents what mushrooms to buy, and how to buy, and how to prepare them because their kids were insisting that they buy it. So, we’ve… Instead of working on the geographic expansion, what we've done is that we have increased our mushroom business here in Rio.  And we actually think that the mushroom business… With this show room, this at-the-store production... By the way, it is a showroom. People come here, and they can come and visit. You know, they can walk in the production area. The area the mushrooms grow in is separated. We basically have a giant aquarium that separates it. You know, we have agronimers that specialize in mushrooms that conduct classes here. We do school events here with the mushrooms as well. And now, you know, we've got videos that we’re now, you know, we’re now putting a video display in the container so people can come in and learn more about containers. So instead of going to other cities with one product, right? What we're doing is solidifying, you know, our position here in Rio with the mushroom business, which is growing very rapidly, and then plan to use that to lead us into the other markets because the volume of demand for mushrooms is even higher than microgreens.

Taylor Martin:  Wow! You mentioned tomatoes earlier. I mean, tomatoes. That’s… Talk about a huge market. Are you guys heading in that direction after the mushrooms kinda get secured?

Tom Oberlin:  You know, what we see right now, Taylor, is the next step will probably be strawberries for us. I'll touch on that why in a minute and then tomatoes. Tomatoes is a large capital investment. To do tomatoes the way we want to do it really is going to require a very substantial capital investment.

Taylor Martin: Well, speaking about capital investment, I mean… Are you guys looking for investors to come in and help? I mean, where's the company at in that stage?

Tom Oberlin:  We are, Taylor. We've now gone through 2 rounds of Angel Investments, and we're now in the process. In fact, we had a couple different groups that were interested right as the pandemic hit and the stock market started to crash. We're still discussing, but we are interested in and looking for investors who are looking for sustainable agriculture products, you know, that have an appetite for investing in Brazil. You know, we've got a nationally known brand name. We are the pioneers in the microgreen business here. There's nobody else that's known for this, right? And now our mushroom business is a highly lucrative business and so… So yeah. We're looking for it.

[0:40:21] Taylor Martin:  I got to tell you; I'm actually just really blown away. I mean, you just blew the gasket off me for a couple of things. I’m just… I just can't believe the efficiency…. the sustainability aspect of it is just really remarkable. We know that we're going to have food problems in our future, you know, as this planet keeps… You know, we keep acquiring more and more humans on this planet. But, like you mentioned before about, you know, being able to grow local, you know. I think... You know, everybody talks about indoor vertical farming and things like that but, I mean… Something like this where it's in a shipping container, and you can stack those things, or you can put a couple in front of a grocery store or in the back of the store. It doesn't matter where they're at really! I mean, they're all contained, right?

Tom Oberlin: Yep. On the roof! Yep. 

Taylor Martin:  On the roof! I mean, it's just mind-blowing, man. I just think you're onto something that's really truly remarkable. So, I'm going to go back to what I said in the beginning intro when you said that you were going to try to live up to that 1%. You went up to 100%, Tom. I'm serious, man! I'm really blown away by this.  And I've got so many people that I know in the green space of, like, farming and agriculture that are going to love this show.  And I cannot wait to share this with them. I'm literally just writing down the names as we're talking about this.

Tom Oberlin:  One more thing. I don't want to wrap up before I mention this because we talk about locally grown, right? With the mushrooms… What we just did this week… We go out into our mushroom factory as we call it. We're starting our first, you know, commercial test. We're going to be growing mushrooms…. And the only thing that didn't come from something that was used in the store is the mushroom seed. I'm taking plastic, you know, buckets that the bakery uses… that receive butter in… I'm taking cardboard, and the coffee grounds that they throw away from the espressos they sell here, and mixing those together, putting them in the buckets and seeding that. And we're going to grow mushrooms that are literally going to consume the waste product of the store and turn it into food.

Taylor Martin:  That's awesome! On so many levels. It's like… I was just having this conversation with somebody the other day. It's really about the question. I always say the question comes first. Like, for instance... You know, which came first- the chicken or the egg? I always say the question came first. 

Tom Oberlin: [Laughing] 

Taylor Martin:  Because, you know, the question is what drives us to come up with a solution. Like, you have a hurdle in front of you… something that's getting in your way.  Do you go around it? Do you go over it? Do you blow it up? I mean, the idea is, like, "What's the question? I gotta get through this. I got to get past this." You know, I think you guys are answering all the right questions, but you have the right questions. You're getting in there, and you’re making things happen that I've never heard of or read about. I'm so excited for you. I cannot wait to call you back up and, you know, keep in touch, and see how the Mighty Greens grows into all these other different things. No pun intended! 

[Both Laughing]

So, before I go, though, how can the listeners dial into your brand, Mighty Greens, and get a hold of you and follow the progress of what you guys are doing down there in Brazil?

Tom Oberlin: The best way is to go to our website, which is mightygreens.farm. Now, it's all in Portuguese, but I know, Taylor, you've taken a look at it and been able to figure out it and how to understand how we're doing.

Taylor Martin: Yep. I used Google Translate to translate the webpage.

Tom Oberlin:  It’s amazing! And there's a contact point down there where you can send an email. We have an Instagram page also at mightygreendobrasil; that’s another place you can find us.  

Taylor Martin: Yeah. I saw that you guys had Instagram, too, and a bunch of other social media platforms that you have connections on. So, there's a lot of ways people can connect to you once they get to your website. 

Tom, I'm totally blown away. I am so looking forward to sharing this podcast with a lot of listeners out there. I wish you and your team all the best in your future endeavors. I am so incredibly grateful for your time and sharing the stories that you have with us. And I also just want to give you a little bit of extra kudos for being a leader in that space and allowing your knowledge and technology that you have spent your time and energy on by sharing it with others to help promote, you know, other people to get involved and to grow that market and that business. Kudos for that one.

Tom Oberlin: Thank you, Taylor. You know, I love what you're doing with the podcast. You're doing something that the market has a need for.

Taylor Martin:  I know. Every podcast that I'm about to do, I get so excited. I can't wait for it to start and just, you know… And then as soon as I get done with this one, I got another one tomorrow. 

Tom Oberlin: [Laughing]

So, I'm just loving it.  So, again, I'm so glad I was able to get you on board today and capture these wonderful stories and get us up to date on Mighty Greens. So, Tom, thank you so much for your time. Listeners out there, reach out to mightygreens.farm to learn more. That is it for today. Over and out! 

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Female Voice:  Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you are logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line. 

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