Founding Loop Farms
A given in the world of start-ups is that you’ll pitch until you are blue in the face, and when you pitch, something you always get asked is, “why are you the right people to be doing this?”
It is a question with a long answer, but you have only a few seconds to respond. Here at Loop we believe that thorough answers are good, and the experiences and learnings that have brought us here cannot be explained in a snappy sentence or two. For those who want to know us better, here’s the short version of how we ended up as Loop’s founding farmers.
Aimee
Aimee is originally from Northern British Columbia, Canada. For the few who have been lucky enough to visit her home town of Smithers, you can understand what I mean when I say that she grew up in the picture-perfect pastoral farming community; for the rest of you, you don’t know rural until you’ve been to Smithers. While Aimee was surrounded by the agricultural community in her early years, the aspect of Smithers that had a lasting impact on her was the seemingly irreconcilable clash of perspectives on industry: forestry vs. logging, environmentalism vs. mining, sustainable vs. untenable. She always believed that the answer to this dilemma lay in finding ways to create economic growth without compromising on environmental stewardship.
As an undergraduate, Aimee and her team won a competition in Singapore with an idea to put farms on the rooftops of school buildings to provide food for the local communities. After graduating she was drawn in a different direction professionally, but the idea of hyperlocal farming never left her - being a technologist, she just saw herself as more of a customer than a farmer. Aimee spent the first phase of her professional career as an IT systems consultant, helping fit together pieces of a technical landscape puzzle for large organisations. In this, she found joy in designing elegant, cohesive solutions by combining disparate technologies.
Which leads us to the present day: Aimee’s love of hyperlocal food, combined with her determination to find strategies for a climate friendly economy sparked her interest in urban farming; her background in technology synthesis and process design underpin the Loop concept.
Julie
Julie was raised in London, UK, and is a self-proclaimed science nerd who could rattle off all the components of a mitochondria to anyone who would listen when she was 12 (not that anyone would). Attending the University of British Columbia for her undergraduate degree, Julie loved labs in ecology, organic chemistry and zoological physics. Her background in science has spurred her to approach all projects with a scientific framework in mind.
Julie’s earliest memories are of visiting her grandfather's property in Puerto Rico during school holidays. She would follow him around as he showed her how to pick papayas from trees almost 8 meters high, and as he noted down the exact rainfall each day to track the changes in moisture throughout the year. She developed a passion for working with plants and growing food that could sustain you on your own property - an idea that was not a reality in London, but was for her grandparents, and as she hopes with Loop Farms, will be everywhere in the future.
After university, Julie traveled around Canada and the world. She worked in ski resorts and for major sporting events in operations and logistics, later gaining experience in impact measurement and sustainability strategy.
Joining Forces
In January 2021, locked down in small Berlin apartments Julie and Aimee started their MBA program at the European School of Management and Technology. In fact, it took two months before they even met in person for a long run on a very cold, snowy day (cue Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca). During the MBA Julie and Aimee both participated separately in the Vali Berlin entrepreneurship program where Aimee pitched the original Loop Farms idea, built on her experience as an undergraduate at the competition in Singapore. Later in the year, as our classmates started talking about applying to jobs, Julie and Aimee started talking about the future of Loop Farms and what the next steps might be to making it a real, live business. In October of 2021, Julie and Aimee officially decided to become co-founders.
Aimee (left) and Julie (right) hiking in South Africa, as usual, only pictures with our eyes closed were taken.
