Jessica Fong
The founder of Yau Tong-based Common Farms tells Kate Whitehead about her teen years in the ‘Wild Wild West’ of Shanghai and how she came to grow the greens seen at some of Hong Kong’s top restaurants.
SO LONG, DAD My grandparents were from Canton province – my grandfather on my mother’s side escaped China by swimming to Hong Kong – and my parents were born here. They came from poverty, they didn’t finish school and grew up in public housing. My dad was in the trading business and by the time I was born, in 1990, my parents were middle class. When I was six months old, my mum and I moved to Vancouver and my dad continued working in Hong Kong. He was in the kitchenware industry, acting as the middleman between the factories and big retailers such as Target, Walmart, Tesco and Sainsbury’s. He would come to Canada for a weekend or a week at most three times a year, so I didn’t see much of him when I was growing up.
SCHOOL WORK In 1995, we moved back to Hong Kong; by that time I had a younger brother. I went to a local band one school, Heep Yunn, which was a struggle as I didn’t know how to write in Chinese and my Cantonese was poor. I was miserable, I woke up at 7am, had a tutor in the morning and did homework and went to school in the afternoon. My backpack was half my size and after school there was more homework and bed by 11pm. My weekends were packed with activities – taekwondo, piano. This was all noise given to my mum by local parents. She couldn’t handle the stress of it, she’d seen how I was so full of joy in Canada, so in third grade she switched me to International Christian School. My English wasn’t great and I was put in an English as a second language class. I was determined not to be seen as a second-class kid and within two months I had joined the regular class.
GOING INTERNATIONAL My dad decided my brother and I needed to learn Mandarin and understand China, so in 2003 we moved to Shanghai, and I went to the international division of Shanghai High School. Things were quite Wild Wild West for teenagers there, you could start drinking in your early teens, especially if you were a foreigner. After a year, as I was preparing for college, I moved to Shanghai American School. Shanghai was booming, and international brands like H&M and Zara came in. It was changing quickly and was an exciting time and place to be a teenager. I chose to study in Paris because it was one of my favourite cities and went to the American University of Paris. I didn’t know what I wanted to do except that I was interested in fashion and wanted to be creative. I stayed in Paris for four years and ended up with a double major in business and communications. On the side, I went to Parsons Paris, attended a lot of fashion shows and parties and met people in the industry. I realised that what you see on the outside is very different from what’s happening inside. A fashion designer friend working for one of the top brands wasn’t making much money, there was no way he could have afforded any of the clothes he designed. I realised it wasn’t something I wanted to be a part of.
IN MY FATHER’S FOOTSTEPS A few months before graduation, I met up with my dad in Europe and he asked me to help take the load off him. Other than trading, he invested in factories and in 2007 had bought a factory in Shenzhen, which had drained the family finances. My mum had switched from being a housewife to help him on the accounting side. I came back to Hong Kong and had a pretty awful experience in the office, where I was seen as the boss’ daughter. My friends were all in Ibiza and the south of France and I was sitting in a cubicle. I moved to China to be close to my dad’s factory. It focused on food-grade plastic and stainless steel. It was there that I realised the challenges and sacrifices my parents had gone through to keep the factory alive. My dad’s partners had left a big financial hole and they were trying to salvage that. My dad gave me a salary that was lower than the allowance I’d had as a student and I realised I needed to find my own customers and get some sales going. I looked for young entrepreneurs’ brands and start-ups and helped them develop their products – anything that was plasticbased. I got lucky and found some great customers and made a chunk of money at an early stage.
QUARTER-LIFE CRISIS I learned a lot from my dad in terms of business, but the way we did things was very different and we clashed every day. So, after two years, I got into the restaurant business and became a project manager for a chef, Gianni Caprioli. He had a restaurant at Fenwick Pier and wanted to expand. I helped him project-manage a restaurant in Macau. There are a lot of principles you can take from manufacturing work in terms of sourcing, negotiation and time-management skills. We did seven projects
together in 18 months and it was there that I learned the importance of making high-quality, nutritious, and freshly grown food more accessible in Hong Kong. At the age of 26 I had a quarter-life crisis and felt an urgency to figure things out. I knew I wanted to be the person building a business rather than watching someone else build one. I took some time away from the restaurant business and travelled – to Galapagos, Bhutan and Nepal – and got my motorcycle licence. I was so lost, I didn’t know what to do with my life. I was dating here and there but I wasn’t ready to settle down.
LET IT GROW Having travelled in Europe, I knew what real food quality and flavour was and in Hong Kong we were getting a fraction of it at a premium price. I knew the problems – the cost of fresh produce, the fluctuation of prices, the lead time and the wastage. In 2017, I rented a small space in Cheung Chau for HK$7,000 a month to trial indoor farming and paid two childhood friends to help. I registered the company, Common Farms, but I didn’t know what kind of business it would be. I worked on it at night and weekends while still doing some of the manufacturing work. I taught myself how to grow things by watching a lot of YouTube videos. After a year, it wasn’t viable, and I ended the lease and for the next 18 months I borrowed spaces – on the rooftop of a restaurant and a friend’s place – to grow things. I would buy the seeds, hiring labour to do the maintenance and the harvesting. I was running all over the place to get the produce to the restaurants before dinner service.
BUSINESS IS BLOOMING In 2019, I realised I needed to have my own farm. I’d never done fundraising before, so that was a challenge, but it got us the first farm, a 1,600 sq ft space in Aberdeen. I did a second round of fundraising and a few months ago we moved into our 9,000 sq ft space in Yau Tong. We’ve grown it through word of mouth between chefs and sell to restaurants like Amber, Caprice, Roganic and Whey.
Our competitors are the importers. We have importers asking for the produce so they can do the distribution because it’s less friction, it’s faster, the shelf life is longer. We’ve had cancer patients who have read studies online about how micro broccoli has micro nutrients that help fight cancerous cells. During Covid we had a bunch of people asking for edible flowers. The flavours and taste relate to the micro nutrients in the plant.
THAT’S GRATITUDE Every day it’s such a privilege to grow food. Sure, we’re just growing edible flowers, garnish leaves and herbs, but we have the full horizon of all the things we can grow in the plant kingdom. We can go into marine-based plants – algae and sea grapes that are super nutritious as well. I want to grow Common Farms for the next 10 years sustainably and make high-quality food as accessible as possible. I wake up at 5am and do journaling. It’s something I picked up in my 20s during the challenges of the family business, which led to some pain and trauma. I start with a gratitude journal and envision what my day will look like – it really grounds me and sets my day up. I haven’t travelled for the past three years, but recognising gratitude for little things, like hearing birds, that’s a privilege. Journaling has been the way I’ve been able to offload and process things. It has helped changed my outlook on life.