axo

Our current food system is severely broken. Conventional agricultural practices contribute to 10% of US greenhouse gas emissions -consumers are waking up to this reality and demanding change in the form of transparency and sustainability. In response, large food companies are beginning to invest in regenerative agriculture, but small and medium-sized food companies are being left behind. They don’t have the means to control their supply chain so it lacks transparency into how their raw materials are grown.

Axo is on a mission to regenerate the planet by making it easier for brands that want to source sustainable ingredients to find small farmers that are taking climate-smart approaches on their farms.

Our social impact targets 88% of farms in the US that are small family farms. Oftentimes, these farmers are forced to work two jobs because they can’t break even.   

These farmers are more likely to be women or minorities, and disproportionately affected by climate change, as they don’t have the means to survive a bad year of harvest due to increased droughts and severe weather events.      

By cutting out many middlemen, 100-acre farms will make an additional $63,000 a year. This has trickle-down effects on rural communities in America, 20% of which are farm-dependent economies.   

By demonstrating demand and by providing easy access to food companies, Axo sets the incentives needed to switch to a sustainable food system.  

Our environmental impact kickstarts the regenerative revolution, and each 100-acre farm converted, sequesters enough carbon to offset 460 cars a year. If one-half of our farmer partners by Year 5 have switched to regenerative agriculture, it translates to sequestering the emissions from 230,000 cars a year. Climate change is truly an existential threat with poor communities around the world bearing the brunt of its effects. It is critical to do everything we can to help reverse the effects of climate change. 

We are a technology solution that connects regenerative farmers directly to food companies:

First, we verify farmers follow regenerative practices through axo’s checklist and in-person verifications.

Farmers will update their information in our platform, so that food companies can search our database for available crops.

Next, the person in charge of sourcing at any food company just needs to go to our website, and pick the regenerative ingredients she wants.  

They’ll also be able to specify a range of prices, additional certifications, and payment preferences.

Then, our platform will source from onboarded farmers and aggregate across them to deliver the required volume.

The sourcing manager won’t need to log each individual farmer to the procurement software, they’ll make one payment and we’ll take care of distributing to multiple farmers.

Next, taking into account key factors for optimal delivery, we’ll coordinate the most cost-efficient routes with our logistics partner, HWY-Haul, who provides food companies with an uber-like experience for their raw materials’ delivery.

Lastly, Axo provides marketing and storytelling material of our farmers. This gives food companies transparency through their sourcing and helps market their products to the end consumer while promoting regenerative agriculture.

On the farmers’ side, we want to target small farmers like Margaret. She’s a fourth-generation farmer who has adopted regenerative practices through some portions of her 200-acre farm. She drives her traditional crops to the only grain elevator in the area, and sells her produce directly to consumers, and attends farmers’ markets, but she’s interested in expanding her client base… the thing is that she has so much work already and really no idea where to start.  

She told us she’s desperate for a specialty crop market because she wants to adopt regenerative practices throughout her whole farm but without a market for transitional or specialty crops, she’s scared the time and effort will be in vain.  

On the food companies’ side, we want to target small to medium size climate-conscious food companies like Caroline’s. She told us they wanted to launch a new trail mix, and that they needed oats. Since her company is sustainability-driven, they wanted to source regenerative oats. Her suppliers couldn’t find any, so Caroline manually went through a whole database and called every farmer there, but she couldn’t find a farmer that provided the volume they required. So, they didn’t launch this new product.  

For the end consumer, we want to target everyone by granting access to healthy food. Regenerative agriculture eliminates toxic chemicals and antibiotics from our food system and delivers more nutrient-dense food, which ultimately strengthens our bodies’ immune response while decreasing chronic disease in our population. Farmers’ health is also improved since they’re the ones directly exposed to dangerous chemicals.

Functioning ecosystems are crucial to a stable climate with breathable air and an active water cycle. We bring more nutrient-dense food to consumers and kickstart the regenerative revolution so regenerative practices become the status quo.

Our solution seeks to restore carbon-rich ecosystems and biodiversity hotspots. Since 44.4% of U.S. land is used for agriculture, its impact and the need to restore soil health is imminent.  

Axo’s verification process provides scalable and verifiable monitoring and data collection to track ecosystem conditions, such as biodiversity.  

Our model is dedicated to connecting local and regional farmers and brands, further reducing our carbon footprint.  

We are in the process of designing and building our platform to be able to connect farmers and food companies at scale. In parallel, we are working to test our concept on a small scale by manually connecting farmers and food companies.

We have 2 small to medium-sized food companies that have agreed to participate in our pilot, one of which is signing an LOI.

On the farmers’ side, we’ve visited 5 small family farms in Red Oaks, IA who will be providing oats for our pilot.

For our logistics, we’ve partnered with HWY Haul to prove our business model in this pilot.

The way food companies source their products hasn’t changed in a long time. It still relies on a lot of back and forth phone calls, emails, physically attending conferences and expositions, and network building. Food sourcing and its distribution are characterized by a complete lack of transparency: neither the food companies know where their food is coming from nor the farmers know where their products might end.  

This creates an inefficient and rudimentary process for sourcing managers and leaves end consumers clueless about the origin of what they eat every single day. The way we source our ingredients is in heavy need of modernization. 

Our digital platform wants to digitalize the experience while being customizable to the specific needs of each client and farmer. We think that the relationship between a producer and a grower should also be harvested. We know that technology can facilitate this connection and ease the burden of multiple suppliers and payments.

Currently, we are not serving any customers.

In the next year, we aim to serve 10 farmers.

In five years we aim to serve 800 farmers.

1. Isabel Rodriguez Garcia CEO & Co-founder

2. Clara Purk Head of Product & Co-founder

3. Bulbul Jain (part-time) Head of Development & Co-founder

4. Fabian Gosselin (part-time)

5. Alicia Liu (part-time)

Advisor: Gabe Brown (one of the most influential agricultural experts in the US and regenerative expert)

The three female founders live and breathe regenerative 24/7 and are 100% committed to axo.

Isabel founded a sustainability startup in Mexico City that ended becoming one of the key partners of a big recycling center in said city.

Clara has over 6 years of experience leading technology teams and platforms.

Bulbul has 10+ years of operating in the food industry and is a board member of the Institute of Food Technologists.  

Accessing this incredible network is one of the key milestones we've set in axo. We want to be connected and to learn from the best since we truly think our project can change the way our food system work and provide farmers with a more deserving livelihood while aiding food companies to address market demand for more nutrient-dense and sustainable products. We believe the SOLVE network can help us kickstart the regenerative revolution,

We would love to partner with Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research to connect with key players in the food&ag space to further strengthen our network within the industry.

In addition, we really look forward to partnering with EcoAdvisors to connect with food companies that are looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint, so that we can present our sustainable sourcing platform as their most holistic solution.

Lastly, we would approach a partnership with Yum! Brands after confirming our product-market fit in the small to medium food companies market. Our goal would be to help them address the market's growing demand towards a more sustainable food system.

We plan to use the $100,000 grant to support our pilot execution and prep for our low-tech beta. This includes the support of operations and if needed we’ll search for additional funds for the development of our full platform. We’ll run our pilot and most of our beta through manual matching of farmers and buyers while we build out a robust supply on the farmers' side and a more sophisticated platform. We will use the funds primarily for sales & marketing and the technology build-out, as well as logistics and other general expenses. We aim to make some key hires in operations, sales, and technology.