How are social entrepreneurs using technology to make organic food more accessible?
Social Entrepreneur, Will Lau shares with us how BuckyBox will revolutionize the way we get organic food. By making it easier and systematic, Will explains the vision of BuckyBox. He also shares his experience as an entrepreneur and gives tips you should apply today on building your social enterprise.
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About Will:
Will Lau is an experienced serial entrepreneur, founding his first startup in the hi-tech sector in the ashes of the dot-com burst in 2001. Under his leadership, the company exceeded million-dollar profitability by its third year and its awarding winning product won accolades from industry pundits including Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal. After three financially successful businesses in the space of six years, Will took a four year sabbatical over the course of which he became inspired by the possibilities of Social Enterprise for positive and scalable change in the world. Having returned to the world of startups by kickstarting a local food movement into a social enterprise. He is currently co-founding his fifth business, Bucky Box, software for local food distribution which is working on systemic changes in our food system with a vision of mainstream organic farming.
More information on Bucky Box can be found here:
Transcript of the first 5 minutes:
DP: Hey everybody! This is Dwight Peters from QuarterWaters.com, the site for social entrepreneurs! Today we are going to find out how social entrepreneurs are using technology, and software, to change the food industry. With us today I have the founder of BuckyBox, William Lau. Will, welcome to the program man!
WL: Hi Dwight, its nice to be here. Thanks for your time!
DP: Cool, will share with our viewers. What is BuckyBox?
WL: BuckyBox is software. Its wordbased software and we are using it to make local food distribution more efficient. Hopefully we will impact the food system by shifting it more to the local and organic scenes of the spectrum.
DP: BuckyBox makes the food distribution more efficient. How does it do that? What were some of the problems you noticed before you created BuckyBox? What started this?
WL: I got involved with some friends who had been working on a local food movement. Its called Oooby, we got the movement to up to 3000 people involved. After that it was like ‘where to next?’, theres 3000 people passionate about local food. It was an online community, we ran workshops and we tried a shop to sell local gardening stuff and we really needed to take it to a next level. So we got together and decided to do local food delivery.
We just brainstormed it and created a sceme. We thought, we would go and get local produce from local farms, put them in a box and deliver it to customers. Up to that point we had reached people that were passionate about growing their own food in their own back yards and we felt we needed to reach people that weren’t inspire to do that but wanted to have local food. So we designed this delivery mechanism in which we get a cardboard box and put the local food in. We didnt know at the time but this is a very common thing world wide, its also known as a box scheme, in America they will call it CSA’s (Community Supported Agriculture).
But we were in our own world, we thought we were on to something. So we reinvented the wheel as it turned out. Part of the things that we found out is when your coordinating delivery theres a lot of little things to handle. Like customers will call and say “Im on hold for the next two weeks, pause my order” or so and so is starting this week, so and so is starting next week, I like this produce, I dont like this produce. All of that needs to go down into a system, you need to build for it, you need to coordinate your supply, you know, the ins and outs of running an operation even on a small scale like this.
These box schemes just started out with 30,40, 50 people, hopefully you will get to the hundreds, but even at that level you need a system. We found that out and I hacked together a basic system that got us through. The thought came to me that there are thousands and thousands of emerging schemes like this worldwide and most of them are running on spreadsheet, and with proper software we can reduce 2 days of administration down to hopefully 2 hours. Because we can automate the billing, we can take intimate details of each customers needs, and also customer support as they ring up.
