Myfood, a Start-up that Grows
This is the story of MICKAEL GANDECKI, JOHAN NAZARELY AND MATTHIEU URBAN, three digital natives who started their start-up in 2015. Their objective? Developing connected greenhouses. From the balcony to the urban farm, they are solar, connected, grow plants vertically, without chemical inputs... and without any effort! Since then, Myfood is established in 7 European countries including Luxembourg and seems unstoppable in its expansion plans.
The start-up hit the bull’s eye during the Paris agricultural show in 2018. France's President,Emmanuel Macron, even lingered on its booth and launched the idea of a connected greenhouse at the Elysée! The "produce / grow it yourself all year long" specialist comes with a major ambition: to revolutionize the food supply thanks to groundbreaking techniques that allow individuals to harvest fruits and vegetables from their garden or terrace without having to worry about the seasons!
How do they suceed? Combining solar, digital as well as aquaponics and permaculture techniques under a roof, actually a greenhouse. However, these devices are no toys for geeks struggling to till the soil because the key word here is "the pleasure of culture" that comes with ease of use. In the end, an hour and a half of work per week is enough to feed 4 people, according to Mickaël Gandecki who did not hesitate to leave the Luxembourgish world of finance to embark on the adventure. Furthermore an app makes your life easier, allowing you to track the plant’s growth, temperature, and water quality. You will even be alerted if an anomaly is detected!
This eminently digital solution, which resulted from a winning partnership with Microsoft, brings us into the realm of precision farming, a resolutely "smart" agriculture, concerned with preserving our planet's resources. No wonder, then, that Mickaël Gandecki was one of the committed members of the working group on the food pillar of the Third Industrial Revolution in Luxembourg. Its smart greenhouses tick all the boxes of a new lasting agricultural model: decentralized and always closer to our plates, post-carbon, digital and even open-source therefore collaborative and transparent. Projects have already emerged in the Grand Duchy, including a greenhouse located at Pall Center which produces seasonal fruits and vegetables for starters and dishes for the customers of the Orangerie, the on-site gastronomic brasserie. This greenhouse also attracts curious people, tourists and journalists, since it is the first brick materializing a greater ambition of Christiane Wickler: to transform its economic model to put it in phase with the objectives of the Third Industrial Revolution.
The start-up’s philosophy lies in these words "connect to reconnect". Indeed, at the heart of the project, the ambition is to bring back the human dimension in our relationship to food, to reinvest the field of natural cycles, to understand the ecological impacts, to rehabilitate and relocate the production at home in order to physically grasp our food. We are here in the experiential, far from a detached distance via an application. On the contrary, the latter enables the Myfood user community to exchange and contribute to this first and foremost human adventure. "The greenhouse is not a salad producing computer, says Mickaël Gandecki, it's a production space and a living space."
The smart greenhouse specialist is just getting started. With an annual turnover that tripled since its creation, Myfood already has 70 connected greenhouses and its recent 1.2 M € fundraising will allow the industrialization of the concept, with an expected reduction in the installation costs to develop the "do it yourself" and more modularity in the offer. The solution promises to expand to new places. Beyond Europe with strong expected <developments in Germany, the start-up aims to enter the North American market next year.
-Article published on June 1, 2018-