In recent years, the organic market and the Sunday market have been expanding over the years to reflect the growing number of Hong Kong cooking shows using local ingredients and a group of consumers who advocate sustainable practices in their daily lives. We began to gather local farms in Hong Kong many years ago to sell a variety of fresh local organic agricultural products on "Green Kam Sheung Road", promoting the local food culture in the market, thereby offsetting the carbon footprint caused by imports.
Farmers market delivery service - Healthy Express makes it easier for people to get organic products through the Healthy Express website. We chat with Healthy Express co-founder Li Ka Hung about his involvement with Healthy Express and how he envisions every day sustainable, honest food is widely available to individuals.
Can you tell us about you work with your Healthy Express?
Healthy Express and I share the same belief in championing sustainable development and inspiring change through food education. We understand that people may not always have time to visit the market on Sundays, so Healthy Express has partnered with a number of local farms to help deliver homegrown & local products to health-conscious consumers.
Healthy Express was established in 2019, providing shopping services for organic vegetables. But a year later, the startup found the business was not easy, as there were many difficulties in finding the right local organic ingredients and logistics.
Tell us about suppleness. How does it work?
When customers place an order at Healthy Express, they are actually placing an order directly with the farmer. Farmers get "real-time" orders so they can see where customers are and pack to their specifications; on average, customers tend to order from five different suppliers. Our partner delivery service will then travel to 12 pickup farms, consolidate the orders and sort all items for delivery to the customer. If you order before midnight the night before, your groceries will be with you in the afternoon 2 days after.
In addition, Healthy Express found that the original business model was not cost-effective, as shoppers were buying groceries at market prices, and the company is currently not charging customers more for delivery and packaging. Therefore, the delivery fee was gradually increased from the initial $250 to $400 to balance the logistics expenses and costs. In addition, by expressing to consumers that although the vegetables that may be bought in the market may be cheap, but the fresh vegetables bought in the supply chain in the market, "there is a huge gap between what farmers get paid and what customers buy". Health founder LI Ka hung added that, for example, consumers buy vegetables at HK$10 per catty in supermarkets or wet markets, but farmers only get 5 cents or HK$1 per catty. Gradually let consumers understand that no less than 50% of our price is directly delivered to the farmer. It is possible that the farmer's organic vegetables and our cost cannot be lower than the wet market price. However, our pricing order When there is a sustainable relationship between producers and consumers, our mutual benefits are the most.
How often do you update your website with seasonal products?
If you go to our website and check out our local vegetables and fruit section, you'll see that it changes about every two days. Our suppliers are very good at giving us fresh and in-season information.
How did you come up with this good Chinese name?
The Chinese name (餸您健康) comes from the Cantonese pronunciation "give you health" and is related to the belief of the company that caring about your health.
Why do you want to start Healthy Express?
It makes sense to buy food online in Hong Kong. High retail rents have pushed up food prices as supermarkets have to add extra costs to account for about 30 percent of the unsold and therefore discarded produce. My team and I started Food Your Health to cut out the middleman and lower prices for our customers.
We provide on-demand service, which also reduces waste. For example, if you order 10 catties of local white rice today, the farmer will only harvest 10 catties, preventing over-harvesting. However, if you're a supermarket, you tend to over-order because you don't want to run out of stock or have empty shelves, plus, supermarkets are increasingly putting products at a combined price (minimum purchase quantity, MOQ, on the another way, there's a special price for buying 2 pieces), forcing consumers to overspend. This is how a lot of food waste usually starts.
We quickly realized that transparency is also an important factor for our clients. They want to know where their food comes from. On Healthy Express, you can find out where the product comes from and check if the supplier has a registered organic license. This is becoming more and more important to people - especially those with children.
Why is that?
You always hear from parents that while the occasional fast food meal is fine, it's really important for kids to eat more organic fruits and vegetables. I think parents are more cautious about healthy eating these days, and a lot of our clients are families.
Can you elaborate on the sustainability aspects of your business?
We always offer local, organic, sustainable options wherever possible. Over 95% of food in Hong Kong is imported, but the percentage on our website is much lower. Of the 33 food suppliers we work with, 10 are from Hong Kong.
The Hong Kong government in 2019 launched a program that accredited fisheries that can verify that they are free of certain antibiotics and hormones. We stock fish from these certified fisheries through FMO; the fish comes with a special QR code tag that tells the customer where it was raised. We also source chicken from local farms and we are also source with local pig farms.
How do you vet the suppliers you work with to ensure they are honest?
In the last industry I worked in, I learned the importance of talking to people to see if they are honest and reliable. I try to have a similar process to Healthy Express when it comes to picking suppliers, because if someone wants to cut corners. In addition to having the proper paperwork, we're trying to understand why the supplier started their business - the philosophy behind it and why it's important to them. We also inspect suppliers' facilities. If the requirements are not met or the producer refuses to show us, we will reject them. We understand the importance of quality to our customers.
We have also terminated cooperation with a local farm because they did not sincerely tell us the location of their farms and tell us which are domestic and which are locally produced. In the end they also suspended the supply of goods to us.
What are Healthy Express' future plans?
We hope this service will provide consumers with food from a reliable source. Our business has doubled since last summer, which is encouraging for our team.
More information flow and transparency is needed when it comes to food. In the apparel industry, for example, more efforts are being made to ensure ethical labor and environmentally friendly materials are used in production. There is now an even greater international push for workers' rights and sustainable manufacturing practices. In the food industry, however, it is still a very localized movement. We will try to emphasise presenting this information in our online store.
I would love to develop a tool where you can search for the best quality products - a user-generated platform where people can express their opinions about suppliers. I haven't seen anyone building that platform yet, so I guess it's possible for us!
Li said Healthy Express is slightly profitable on a per order and operational basis, but has yet to achieve a net profit as research and development investments continue. The platform currently has 1,500 users with an average order size of around HK$700.
He said that although the company rarely advertises directly and promotes roadshows, the company's revenue is at least doubling every year and will start its marketing campaign at a later stage because they are now confident that they will know us through more consumers, as well as scalable mode gets 5 to 10 times the traffic.
Healthy Express is planning to raise funds to expand B2B/B2C business, provide more products at competitive prices by sourcing directly from Chinese farms, and further invest in R&D and marketing to increase brand awareness. "China has some very high-quality farms," Li said. "It's really unfortunate that those farms really want to grow something better, but wholesalers who compete on price always choose the cheapest vegetables to buy."
