1. About the brand
FurryGreen: Making delicious pet meals from our wasted food
WHAT:
FurryGreen converts preprocessed food from us humans into tasty and nutritious pet meals. 40% of their ingredients are such upcycled food and 60% are bought. Their meals are cooked with 100% natural ingredients and have 0% preservatives.
They also consulted food science professors.
WHY:
Over 40% of food is wasted during processing, hence it is highly non cost-effective producing our meals everyday. The food system needs to minimize waste.
HOW:
They collect pre-processed food from factories or big institutions, such as hotels and airlines. They will centralise collected food, stir, vacuum and slow cook them without putting in preservatives and additives, then sell to consumers.
WHAT’S GOING ON NOW:
Business is currently a break even. They will continue to self-sustain for now, distributing across Hong Kong’s major shopping lines including HKTVMall.
They also donate food to rescued animals in animal shelters and local NGOs.
2. About the founders
Pirry Leung
Studied Environmental Engineering Technology and Science in Canada
Ran several recycle businesses including processing tofu dregs into cat litter
Vision
Instead of solely reducing waste, Pirry believes turning wastes into resources is much more effective and relevant.
Through social enterprise, he can support individuals to pursue what they find meaningful too.
3. Challenges and opportunity
Covid-born business leveraging the tough times
Challenge
FurryGreen was founded in 2020, at the beginning of Covid. All communications can only be done through emails and zooms making pitches hard, plus big food processing institutes such as hotels have stopped operating.
Solution
It became an opportunity for FurryGreen to go straight to the source – food factories, and use a cheaper price to buy wasted food from them.
They can also operate on a small scale first, so they can minimize cost and manpower, hence being more flexible.
4. Brand Development Timeline
2020 till now
After closing the cat litter business due to land rental problems, Pirry self-funded FurryGreen in the beginning of Covid.
5. The Future
Market expansion, looking the right investors
They are considering expanding to Macau, where there are bigger institutes such as hotels for them to partner with.
They are also finding like-minded investors but this will go down to time and patience. Self-funding is still manageable for the team.