MingaGreens

This interview details MingaGreens, an indoor farming company based in Germany. The interview is with Gernot Kleinberger, Co-Founder of MingaGreens.

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What is the origin story of MingaGreens?

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MingaGreens was founded in the middle of the Corona pandemic when Thomas, Florian, and I were not able to follow one of our passions. To play tennis. During the last years, we developed a friendship while playing in the same team and thought we also had to engage in a business endeavor. Florian is a well-known physiotherapist in Munich; Thomas is heading the Munich branche of a consultancy agency and I have been working in the life science industry.

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Furthermore, we all three have families with small children, another point that connected us. So we asked ourselves the following question repeatedly: Which project can we run together? 

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As we were not allowed to meet in person, we spent hours and hours in video calls discussing our hopes, visions, and goals most of the time discussing topics like health, food, and sustainable concepts. It was also clear that we wanted to develop our own product. Something that you can physically show or give to the people. Finally, we ended up with the topic of indoor farming and its potential to be one piece of the puzzle towards a better future. 

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With the limited available space we had, growing Microgreens was the most reasonable choice for us. Also because none of us had experience with growing plants professionally. We also decided very early that we first would like to focus on the product itself before investing in technology, which was a smart choice in the end. Our first trials selling our greens on the field were so successful that we turned a 20 m2 room in my basement into a microgreen farm. This was the start of MingaGreens and we then produced more than 1 year of organic certified greens for the Munich market out of a basement in a row house.

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What are some of the biggest challenges facing MingaGreens in the future?

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As most indoor farms are struggling with high energy demand and high energy costs, this is also one of the challenges for MingaGreens. Indoor Farms are predestined for using energy from renewable sources but investing in the infrastructure is expensive. 

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MingaGreens has moved to a bigger production facility in the middle of 2022. Since then we have been developing an old building that used to be the boiler house of a paper mill. While it fits into the mindset of transforming existing venues into new agricultural units, there are a lot of challenges that come with old buildings. As we are still the only productive start-up in this building, winter will be again a challenging time for MingaGreens.

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Thinking ahead the challenge will be to grow further in a healthy manner. This means taking step by step while growing slowly in terms of revenue and employee numbers.

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What is unique about MingaGreens compared to competitors?

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Like many microgreen farmers, we started with a very local mindset and with the goal to reduce food miles and packaging waste. In terms of packaging waste, we decided to abandon any plastic packaging. So first of all we sell our microgreens uncut. This allows us to be organically certified. For our customers in retail, we package them in cartoon packaging that is also bigger than the size of our fellow microgreen growers. Furthermore, we use reusable boxes that hold 12 pieces of our greens. 

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For our Munich chefs who order directly from us, we deliver our greens in growing trays without any packaging. The trays we take back and the chefs do not have any packaging waste. 

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While we are growing in terms of customers and partners we still have the goal to pursue sustainable solutions.

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How do you measure the impact of MingaGreens so far? (Revenue, Employees, Customer Quantity, Production Volume) etc?

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MingaGreens started as a project among friends who wanted to provide a local and healthy product. Since then MingaGreens has grown out of a basement into a small-scale production plant where we could fine-tune our production practices. We managed to increase our revenues steadily, although we were hit by several crises (e.g. energy crises, reduced spending capacities, …). We are very proud of our employees who fully engage in the mission of MingaGreens to produce the best local greens in the Munich area.

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Due to the fact that we started during the coronavirus pandemic when the restaurants were closed, we have developed a strong customer base in the organic supermarkets. Also, our focus on catering companies as well as on factory canteens that value good and healthy food for their employees gave us a very healthy customer base on which we can build further. 

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Furthermore, we are currently in the process of partnering with an agricultural company that fully shares our values makes us very proud and shows us that Mingagreens is on the right track.

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What have you learned that you wish you knew when you joined or started the company?

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First of all, I am very grateful for all the challenges that we went through in the last couple of years. Although there is plenty of information on growing microgreens online we had to experience a lot of challenges on our way that are owing to the circumstances (where you grow, how much you grow, which customers you serve,…). Although it was never nice to have a setback, we always came out more knowledgeable and better than we were before and I don’t want to miss any of them.

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Nevertheless, it would have been certainly an advantage to be more knowledgeable in the areas of room climate control and accounting 😊

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How can people connect with you or learn more about MingaGreens?

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We at MingaGreens are very open-minded and open to engaging with people interested in indoor farming and our journey. We can be reached either via E-Mail (servus@minga-greens.de) or contacted via our LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook profiles.

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We are always delighted to engage with people who are like-minded.

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