Portrait of Guillaume Fourdinier (IÉSEG 2010) – co-founder of Agricool
09/29/2017
Guillaume Fourdinier
Portrait of Guillaume Fourdinier, a 2010 graduate from the IÉSEG Grande École Program and co-founder of Agricool – a start-up that has recently raised over 8 million euros to revolutionize urban agriculture. We met with him in late August 2017, just a few days before the start-up started selling its strawberries that have been grown in recycled shipping containers in Paris!
What made you decide to become an entrepreneur?
I have always been passionate about entrepreneurship. During my studies at IÉSEG, I created a company called Tombapik, which helped students find housing, amongst other things.
Following this initial experience, I thought, what can I do to become a better entrepreneur? I identified two main points: the first was to go and get practical sales experience. The second was to acquire some managerial experience, as we did not have employees at Tombapik. I thus became a pharmaceutical sales representative in Normandy. This was a very formative experience, and my associate Gonzague Gru and I then decided to create Agricool in 2015.
What is Agricool’s main mission and goal? And why did you choose urban agriculture?
We created Agricool with the aim that everyone can have better and healthier fruits and vegetables. We’re both sons of farmers and we grew up in the countryside. We found that the quality of the fruits and vegetables that we tasted in Lille or Paris was different to those we ate when we were little. We wondered how we could improve things. It turns out that there are, on average,1500 km of transportation from “farm to table” in Europe. Consequently, fruit is often picked too soon, which can lead to a bland taste and lack of nutritional value. We wanted to find a way to be very productive in order to have local, pesticide-free products in the heart of the city. This is how we got the idea to use shipping containers and how Agricool was born.
My associate Gonzague Gru and I spent months studying how to transform a container in order to recreate ideal conditions for quality fruits and vegetables to grow, all the while maintaining an excellent productivity per square meter. Inside of each container, we tried to recreate a paradise for fruits and vegetables. We started with strawberries, by creating ideal water and nutrient circuits, with LEDS producing the useful spectrum of sunlight, and bumblebees for pollination. Without using pesticides, by working only with renewable energy and in consuming 90% less water and nutrients, we were still able to be 120 times more productive than in conventional agriculture.
Once you had thought of the container concept, how did you succeed in developing the company?
The first transformed container was placed in Paris on October 2015, and we succeeded in fundraising 500,000 euros. We decided to recruit specialists such as agronomical engineers. Then, in 2016, we were able to fundraise 3 million euros. This allowed for us to go from two people to thirty in 2016, with a huge acceleration in research and development (more than 30 3-month agronomical tests accumulated).We worked a lot on the technological and scientific aspects.
In the summer of 2017, we raised an additional 8 million euros because we were able to prove that we were capable of making the containers very productive, with more than 50 strawberry baskets per day in a 30m² container. The next step is to prove that a container farm can be profitable, and that it has a distribution circuit.
We currently have 5 farm prototype containers in Paris. Once we will have proved that the prototype is profitable, we will have to do some more fundraising to multiply them all throughout the world. Regarding distribution, we start selling our strawberries this September. We will try all of the distribution circuits (supermarket, direct selling, restaurants, markets, etc.) in order to find the most profitable and adaptable recipe for Agricool’s mission and values. We will soon test other fruits and vegetables at a faster speed, seeing as we already have the infrastructure and the expertise.
Do you have international goals?
Agricool’s mission is global by definition; to make accessible fruits and vegetables without pesticide. There are places in the world where people do not have the possibility to have local fruits and vegetables. We are going to quickly develop an international angle. Currently, one of our team members is working 4 days per week on this. Our first prototypes outside of France will probably be launched in the beginning of 2018. There is a good chance that the second Agricool city will not be French!
What are your IÉSEG memories, and how do you think that your IÉSEG journey helps you in the pursuit of your career?
I have a lot of IÉSEG memories! I went to Edmonton, Canada (on exchange) during my second year because I wanted to learn English quickly, and I also took some entrepreneurship classes. Then, during my collective project at IÉSEG, my classmates and I created the “round trip” (aller-retour) association, the goal of which was a cultural exchange with Mongolia. This was a very important project because it provided me with my first entrepreneurship experience. During my fourth year, I created the company Tombapik and I went on a second exchange in Argentina. IÉSEG helped me to develop my spirit of initiative and my desire to become an entrepreneur!