300kg of vegetables. One night. One supplier.
I went into this conversation thinking we were going to talk about kimchi.
We did. But we also talked about a lot more than that.
Rebecca Ghim is the founder of The Ferm, a fermented food business built around a simple but quietly radical idea. The vegetables that get thrown away before they ever reach a plate are not waste. They are ingredients waiting for someone to care enough to use them.
Something that didn’t surprise me but did hate hearing.
A single supplier generates around 300 kilogrammes of vegetable waste in a single night. Not rotten food. Not spoiled food. Fresh cauliflower leaves and broccoli stalks that are perfectly good and going nowhere.
Rebecca collects them. Ferments them. Turns them into something people actually want to eat.
It sounds obvious when you say it out loud. And that is kind of the point.
We spent an hour talking about food, but really we were talking about identity, culture, what we inherit from our grandmothers, and what happens when you build a business around values you are not willing to trade away even when the spreadsheet says you probably should.
It is one of those conversations that stays with you.
Full episode coming soon on The Third Half.
People. Planet. Progress.
