TTH Blueprint Episode 21: Rebecca Ghim: The Founder Turning Food Waste Into Something Worth Eating
I went into this conversation thinking we were going to talk about kimchi.
We did. But we also ended up somewhere I did not expect.
Rebecca Ghim is the founder of The Ferm, an award winning fermented food business built around a beautifully simple idea. The vegetables that get thrown away before they ever reach a plate are not waste. They are ingredients. They just need someone who cares enough to do something with them.
Rebecca came to London seven years ago to do a master’s in design for social innovation. She did not come here to start a business. She came here to stay. The startup visa was the plan. The kimchi was the vehicle. And somewhere between a pitch to her university endorsement body and her first farmers market, something real started to happen.
In this conversation, Rebecca talks about growing up in Korea, leaving at fifteen, and building a life in a city where you have to figure out a lot of things on your own. She talks about her complicated relationship with food, the frustration that became a passion, and why her grandmother’s instinct to use every part of every vegetable is the beating heart of everything The Ferm does.
We talk about what it actually takes to build a supply chain around rescued vegetables. About onboarding suppliers who have never thought of their offcuts as sellable goods. About the moment you realise one supplier generates around 300 kilogrammes of perfectly good vegetable waste in a single night and what that does to your sense of urgency.
We get into identity and culture and why food is one of the most personal things there is. We talk about the AI backlash she faced from her own community, and why she handled it with more honesty and self awareness than most brands three times her size would manage. And we talk about the tension every values led founder faces at some point. How much of yourself do you keep in the jar as you scale?
Rebecca also makes kimchi tiramisu. Italians may never forgive her. I think it sounds incredible.
This is one of my favourite conversations of recent months. Rebecca is thoughtful, funny, completely unpretentious, and building something that genuinely matters. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Find Rebecca and The Ferm at theferm.net and on Instagram at @the.firm.london
Want the full story? Listen to Scott’s full Blueprint conversation with Rebecca Ghim here.
https://player.captivate.fm/episode/3fc0168c-4103-4bc7-a83e-9f6bd5d29577/
If you enjoyed this conversation you might also love our episode with Bruce Soord, the songwriter and creative force behind The Pineapple Thief. Bruce opens up about twenty five years of quietly building an audience, writing an album alone in hotel rooms, grief, memory, and why he stopped chasing success and that is exactly when things started to happen. Watch the full episode here: https://www.thethirdhalf.uk/p/he-quit-chasing-fame-700000-fans
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