A lot of sustainability is sold to us as something new.
New frameworks.
New technologies.
New targets.
New reports.
Then you meet someone like Rebecca Ghim and realise that some of the most powerful sustainability ideas are actually very old.
Rebecca is the founder of The Ferm, a London food business built around fermentation and food waste. But what fascinated me during our conversation wasn’t really the kimchi.
It was the philosophy.
Long before sustainability became a boardroom discussion, Rebecca’s family simply didn’t waste things. Vegetable stems were food. Leaves were food. Parts of ingredients that many of us ignore were treated as valuable.
Not because it was fashionable.
Because it made sense.
That mindset now sits at the heart of The Ferm.
During our conversation, Rebecca described seeing hundreds of kilograms of perfectly usable vegetables being discarded. Not because they were spoiled. Not because they were unsafe. Simply because modern food systems often struggle to find a place for them.
The response wasn’t outrage.
It was action.
What began as a design project, and a slightly desperate need for a startup visa, has grown into one of the UK’s most interesting sustainable food businesses.
Along the way, The Ferm has worked with Ottolenghi, collecting vegetable offcuts from its kitchens and transforming them into products that eventually found their way back onto the menu.
That’s not a PowerPoint presentation about the circular economy.
That’s the circular economy.
Rebecca is refreshingly honest about the challenges too.
How much of a family recipe can survive commercial scale?
What compromises are acceptable?
How do you grow a business without diluting the values that made it worth building in the first place?
These are questions every founder wrestles with, whether they’re making kimchi, software or anything in between.
It’s a conversation about food.
But it’s also a conversation about identity, culture, entrepreneurship, community and the tension between growth and purpose.
And, because this is The Third Half, it somehow ends with a discussion about cheese.
I thoroughly enjoyed this one.
I think you will too.
Full Episode coming up on FRIDAY! dont miss it
People. Planet. Progress.