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Raymond Mak is an indoor farmer who doesn’t own any farms; instead, his company Farmacy empowers other people to grow food everywhere
Raymond Mak only realised that the vegetables he ate were substandard when he had the chance to discover what good ones taste like.
“I volunteered on a trip to a village in Jiangxi province, studying the impact of industrialisation in China,” he says. “It was unexpected, especially trying the vegetables from the village. They were so good—the best I’ve ever experienced in my life. These villagers only made RMB100 to 200 a month, but they got way better vegetables than I did in a wealthy city.”
At the time, he had what most people would consider a really good job—as a management consultant for one of the largest consulting firms—but he decided to give it all up to launch Farmacy, the indoor farming technology company of which he is now CEO.
“I had no complaints about my job, but I was at a stage of my life when I just wanted to do something really impactful; something I believed in.”
Farms-to-fit, for any location
Mak co-founded Farmacy in 2018 and spent the first few years researching indoor farming technology. He soon realised that he wanted to do something a bit different from most indoor farming companies.
“As a data-driven, decentralised agritech company in Asia,” he says. “Big factories with high-rise vertical farming racks—we don’t believe that is sustainable. They consume a lot of energy, and the way they transport and pack products is not sustainable and involves a lot of logistics costs. We inspire people to farm rather than farming ourselves. I give you the system and the data, you get more than 150 species to harvest from.”
That takes the form of the company’s Smart Mobile Farms: modular systems that look like a cross between a chiller cabinet and a vending machine, and that contain everything needed to grow herbs and leafy greens.
