A section of the B.P Highway that collapsed into the Sun Kosi river on Sunday night could have cut the supply chain of Green Growth, but the new online shopping portal for organic produce has a built-in flexibility to survive setbacks.
The innovative start-up delivering home-grown products relies on Nepal’s spreading highway network to source fruits and vegetables and sell them to urban consumers through the Net.
“Usually we are well stocked for products that come from faraway places, so we were not affected by the blockage on the Sindhuli road, but we try to be prepared for all contingencies,” said Nischal Pokharel, in charge of Green Growth’s logistics.
Every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday are delivery days, and Pokharel’s team is busy packing online orders into dispatch boxes of fresh greens and fruits that come from places like Kavre, Ilam, Mahottari, Sindhuli, Biratnagar and Jumla.
FARMING IT OUT
Working out of a small warehouse in Gairigaun, the team sorts, packs, and sends out boxes of assorted vegetables and fruits much like an Amazon for local organic produce.
“The idea is to connect farmers to consumers through the Net, and as long as farmers are benefitting and customers are getting the right product from the right place at the right price we are on the right track,”said Pokharel.
Tired of the daily hassle of going to market and buying low quality vegetables possibly laced with pesticides, health-conscious customers are more than happy to log on to the site for a variety of made in Nepal supplies.
“It has become extremely rare to find pesticide-free food in the market nowadays. None of the vegetables would last without it,” explained Rajeev Neupane, one of the portal’s consumers.
Despite having his own farm in Duwakot of Bhaktapur, Neupane is a frequent online shopper on the Green Growth site for its carefully curated list of Jumla walnuts, Mustang apples, Sindhuli tangerine, or Ilam ghee.
Green Growth is still a bit ahead of its time, but for increasingly health and environmentally-conscious consumers in Kathmandu it couldn't have come sooner. In just two years it has expanded beyond organic fruits and vegetables to also chemical-free soaps, fruit wines and plants from all over Nepal.
Saurav Dhakal calls himself the ‘chief curator’ of the site, and says the business itself grew organically from a workshop he conducted in Jumla two years ago.