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GROW-YOUR-OWN veg pioneer Green Digit, whose SeedCell pods for budding and space-strapped gardeners make their Chelsea debut this week, is looking for £500,000 to expand overseas.
The company offers an easy-grow, all-year system for window sills, desk tops and patios. Snap-open shell casings made of recycled cardboard and natural glue house individual varieties and mini garden kits.
These create a protective microclimate for seeds, such as rocket, mini pumpkin, chilli and courgette, that are pushed into the compost, soak up the right amount of water then germinate, leaving the pods to biodegrade and enhance growth.
Customers are a mixed bunch, reflecting wider social trends and embracing first-time sowers and the less mobile, to a younger urban, health conscious crowd keen to move from house plants into fresh ingredients and scratch cooking.
After three years of trading the business is turning over £200,000 selling online, through garden centres, Booths supermarket chain and Amazon in the UK, with more than 50 per cent going for export.
“We’re definitely reaching the next stage of looking for growth capital, potentially an angel investor with expertise in the US market,” says co-founder and managing director Dan Robson, 30.
Green Digit has always grown its own too, manufacturing and despatching from its unit in Newcastle, complete with a purposebuilt production line.
Robson’s concept evolved from his packaging design studies at Northumbria University, which continues to provide business advice, and then teaming up with fellow owner, engineer Simon ScottHarden.
With £150,000 of venture capital and a £5,000 innovation grant, Robson says: “We started making the products by hand. Now we sell 20 varieties in three main products.
“Always in our minds was our aim to build ranges for anyone no matter what their ability, so they could grow their own from seed and would never again say ‘I don’t know where to start’. We’ve created a straight journey from plant to plate.”
The innovation behind SeedCell is down to material choice says Robson, who grappled with developing the automated production line and finding a plastic-free glue. “Logically garden products should be produced with the highest regard to the environment. We use our own version of a preservative-free adhesive. It has meant building a bespoke packing line to ensure the glue would seal. We’ve done it and are showing a net profit too.”
Sales to Germany, France, Malta and Italy, which began before the Brexit referendum, suddenly surged afterwards, Robson believes helped by the fall in sterling.
When the chance came to partner with a big French distributor, the company took it. Now, after winning the backing of the Royal Horticultural Society, SeedCell is on sale for the first time at the Chelsea Flower Show.
“There are opportunities too in the gift and toy markets and in the film sector with merchandising on relevant productions. The US and Australia are next,” adds Robson.