To most people Mandi Express is simply a fresh produce delivery service, but that's just the tip of our iceberg. We are a lot more than that. We are an agri-tech company, deeply integrated with the supply chain, that is working to streamline and facilitate trade between farmers, consumers and all the intermediaries in between in a fair and transparent way. What could impact the lives of 48 percent of our labor force that work in the agriculture industry and lift them out of poverty.
The company is not the idea, its the "people." It is the people that form a company and it is the people that are responsible for the success or failure of a company.
In my career, working at various companies, I often found myself working through the complexities of the political structure within the department and the organization in order to get noticed; in order to move up. What bothered me was the lack of transparency which lead to the suppression of merit. I had never imagined that one day I would be in charge of a company where I could write the rules.
Mandi Express started off as an experiment in permaculture in my backyard after I had spent 3 months practicing organic farming in Hawaii. I was living in the middle of a rain forest, in a tent for three months, consuming only organic produce (I was on a macrobiotic diet) and drinking only filtered rain water. After about 28 days something really strange happened. My entire body was covered in little red spots and rashes. The body was expelling toxins. It dissipated in a day and the next morning I experienced for the first time in my life how it feels to truly not be sick. My allergies, sinus problems, lethargy, everything - gone. Where I used to pant walking up and down the hillsides of where I worked, I was now running (I had so much energy I did not know what to do with it). It changed my life - until I got back to Pakistan on a mission to recreate my experience there.
What started off as simply a project to grow organic produce became what is Mandi Express today. My backyard experiment was a success. Now I wanted to scale, and so I went to the superhighway in search of farmland. Upon speaking to other farmers I learnt first and foremost that to sell organic produce at that time was next to impossible. The whole sale market or Sabzi Mandi was and is still run the way things worked at the time of colonial rule. There is no electricity, no water, no streets, no proper cleaning system, no loading or offloading docks - its just a bunch of people who have organized themselves in the way that us Pakistanis do, using what we know best - jugaad or innovation. Mind you, this should be considered the most important market in Pakistan, considering its feeding the 6th largest city in the world!
Imagine this - produce comes in trucks that are typically loaded with vegetables in 40 kg sacks (kattas) piled on top of each other. There is a person standing on top of the pile throwing it down to a man catching it and weighing it on an industrial scale. This is happening in front of an open shop in the middle of a so called road (there are layers and layers of decomposed produce and dirt). While this is happening there are bicycle loaders swarming through and in between, along with a herd of men carrying kattas hooked on their backs with foot long sickles, walking casually through what one could consider a battlefield. A truck, a bicycle walla, a 40 kg sack falling from the sky or a loader walking around with a sickle could easily end your life. We have seen fights break out that end with a sickle inside another man. In this little jungle when you walk up to an Arti (auctioneer) and tell him that you are selling organic cucumbers, at first there's a scoff, then a lack of interest, followed by a final insidious smirk that states "this kid has no idea what he is getting into." They do not even register what you just said. "Kheera, kheera hay, gaajar, gaajar hay." So that was the end of growing and selling organic produce in Pakistan. At least for the time being.
Along with the lack of infrastructure the bigger problem is really the ambiguity of price - at farmer level, all the way down to the retail level. 100 rupees spent at the sabzi walla translate roughly into 10 to 20 rupees for the farmer. The rest of it is absorbed in the inefficient yet self regulating supply chain and all its links. This is the farmer and supply chain problem.
The other end of the spectrum, we have the general consumer like you and me. For us, knowing where our vegetables are coming from is like a trick question. Sometimes when a member of our household staff comes back from their village they may bring with them saag, or honey or desi ghee which may be delicious and in some houses coveted. Unfortunately in most cases we rarely appreciate it. These items are usually grown in or around their village, at a farm, far from the pollution of our cities and though things are changing, are mostly organic - thus the great taste. Generally speaking the only place where you can get vegetables, and fruits, and meats, and seafood; all in one place would be a large supermarket. Even there, you do not get the full assortment. You would still have to go to the shop opposite french bakery to get basil or rocket and you would still not know whether the stated quality or price is actually what they say it is. Jugaad like anything else has another side - the side that teaches us how to convert one liter of honey or milk into two, or how to pump water through the aorta of a buffalo's heart to make the meat heavier, or how to inject steroids into a chicken and have it mature faster. This is the dark side of jugaad. We as consumers do not really know, and for some reason do not really care.
But all this is changing. There are people who, like me, would like to only consume organic produce. Would like to know where and how the food that we eat (that we are comprised of) where its coming from. A movement has started. It started in the rest of the world and is starting in Pakistan as well. We want to enable it.
We need people who would like to help us achieve our vision to become the one platform that facilitates the trade of fresh produce by connecting farmers to customers in a transparent and fair way. We are looking for people like us; who care about what we care about; who do not just talk but take action; people who share our values and want to be a part of our growing high energy team trying to make a "big," difference in Pakistan.
