An interview with Guillaume Fourdinier, founder of Agricool, one of Forward Fooding’s top 500 Food Tech startups.

It’s time to put a face to the name…

We asked our FoodTech 500 top-runners to give us a bit of insight into how they started out as a company and their thoughts on the role of technology in Food innovation. Meet Guillaume, the mastermind behind Agricool, making local, tasty and pesticide-free fruits and vegetables available to all. Let’s see what he had to say. 

So tell us a little bit more about you! Where did the idea for your FoodTech company come from?

Guillaume: Gonzague, my partner, and I are both sons of farmers from the North of France. We grew up eating fresh products. When we arrived in Paris as students, we noticed a big difference in the quality of fruits and vegetables compared to those from our childhood. This frustration was clearly the starting point for Agricool: enabling urban people to eat better.

First, we wanted to understand why the quality of food in cities was so different from what we had known. Then, we would design a solution to palliate this loss of quality. As for the why, we did not have to look very far. The blame falls mostly on transportation. In this respect, one figure particularly struck me: between the producer’s field and the consumer’s plate, a vegetable travels an average of 1,500 kilometres!

During this journey, the vegetables generally lose their nutritional properties. Even worse, the varieties are chosen for their resistance to transport, rather than for their taste or nutritional values.

Our objective became clear: we had to find a solution to grow healthy fruit and vegetables in the city in a responsible way, without pesticides, allowing urban dwellers to have access to a new alimentation.

We looked for the perfect atmosphere to enable us to grow fruits and vegetables in the cities. We found a shipping container in my partner’s backyard. We thought ‘great’: containers are globally standardized in volume, they are transportable and can be multiplied everywhere and infinitely. Also, a container is a closed environment, and that’s perfect because the main problem when cultivating in cities is pollution.

That was the launch of Agricool. Today, Agricool has 80 employees, nearly 35 million euros raised and nearly 1,000 punnets of strawberries distributed per week. We have now become super-optimistic about the future of food: we believe that by 2030 we will be able to feed nearly 1/3 of the major developed cities.

How is tech central to your business?

Guillaume: Inside our containers, we recreate a “paradise” for fruit and vegetables.  More specifically, we work on reproducing day-night cycles with the right levels of humidity, carbon dioxide levels, temperature, etc. We design these cycles to be in line with the needs of the crop, at all its growth stages.

We monitor and manage these elements thanks to a software system we have developed internally. This system does not only allows us to get 150 data points per second into the container environment, but optimizes the strawberry cycle through algorithms that control air and water conditions.

Why do you think it’s important to see the food industry embrace tech?

Guillaume: What will we eat in 2050? This question is very popular these days and many articles are detailing the “food trends” of tomorrow. However, I think it is important to explore this question a bit further: How will we eat in 2050?

We will be more than 9 billion on earth, compared to 7.5 billion today, and 70% of this population will live in cities.

How can we feed all these communities? How can we provide them with access to tasty, nutritious, pesticide-free food that has been grown sustainably and responsibly?

The challenge ahead is immense, but we believe this is an incredible opportunity to rethink the food system for tomorrow today.

I am sure that technology will help us to maximize the benefits of the current food system while reducing negative externalities. This is why we use technology at Agricool: to facilitate and maximize the production of healthy and pesticide-free fruits and vegetables in the city.

Want to know more? Check out Agricool’s full profile here.

Congratulations again to Agricool for ranking 6th in the “Agtech” category of the Foodtech 500 list.

To find out who else made it into the FoodTech 500; the top Food Tech companies in the world, click here.

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