On one hand, young, reclined and humble. On the other hand, climbing towards a reckless entrepreneurial peak and hunted by everyone. The 25-year-old student of Lund, Kent Ngo, gives a face to the paradoxical success story.
Kent Ngo and I have decided to meet at nine o´clock in the editorial office of Lundgård. It is late August and summer is fading. I am forced to run from the bus and zigzag between lost exchange students to make it on time.
Despite me being late, Kent Ngo isn’t there either. I make a pot of coffee and wait. And wait. It is soon ten o’clock. I send another mail and think that he will show up soon. At three o’clock in the afternoon, the phone rings. In the other end I can hear a sleepy Kent Ngo. He has overslept our interview – with six hours!
”I am so sorry! I was out canoeing with my class until late yesterday and totally forgot about our meeting”, he says with regret over the phone. Instead, we agree to get together later during the week.
Kent Ngo has the hungry eyes of an entire world directed at him. The 25-year-old student of engineering from Malmö could be sitting on a gold mine of biblical proportions. Together with his colleagues in the start-up company, FoPo Food Powder, he has cracked the code that could exterminate world hunger.
The single biggest threat towards the world’s population is starvation. Every year, more than three million children under the age of five dies because of a lack of food. At the same time, 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted – which is close to 30 percent of all the food produced. This unfair equation made Kent Ngo react.
”The food that is produced today is enough to cover the needs of the planet until year 2050. The fact that a lot of food is wasted is a big problem which affects the famine – we waste money and natural resources. This is something we would like to counteract,” he says.
With the picture of a future disaster etched in the back of his head, Kent Ngo and his colleagues entered a competition for entrepreneurs. On their hands they had a problem: How are we going to bring food to nine billion people by the year 2050? Their solution: Save the 30 percent of food that is being wasted. The idea is to save fruit that looks ugly or distasteful, and give it new life through freeze- and powder-drying. Kent Ngo describes it as a way of big scale dumpster diving.
”We dry the food for it to last much longer, and at the same time the nutrients stay in the food.
The technique to dry food is extremely old – but we have combined it with the knowledge of much food being wasted,” says Kent Ngo.
The idea has had a great impact. FoPo Food Powder came second and won 5,000 dollars in their first big competition. From there and on, we participated in the world’s biggest entrepreneur competition – with one million pounds in the jackpot.
”It is extremely crazy. But we’ve been lucky. We have found people who are very clever and they have helped us a lot. We have been helped by the very best there is in the world within marketing and law. For that we are extremely grateful,” says Kent Ngo.
Since the competition, the idea has become a reality. FoPo Food Powder has grown from three to five co-workers. During summer, the company has also been able to implement its theories practically. In a co-operation with the government of the Philippines, they have made a pilot study in the country with different methods of drying.
During that set-up, not only the function of the company’s product was tested but also the need of it.
”It was a cultural shock to me when we arrived. The police had shotguns and looked for bombs in the cars. At the same time, there was a flooding in the country and then I understood, for real, that people were not living the same way as in Sweden. It gave me the energy to work much harder,” says Kent Ngo.
FoPo Food Powder and Kent Ngo have gone from zero to an up-coming hero in less than a year. In November 2014, Kent Ngo was sitting at Espresso House in Lund thinking about food waste and fruit drying. Today, he’s sometimes sitting in his own office in London.
But despite the brilliant success, Kent Ngo seems to have both his feet on the ground. He seldom wants to talk about himself, instead he leads the conversation to what is the goal of his work. The vision of changing a structural problem.
”We don’t have to produce more food – instead we have to create a value of what exists and change how food is distributed. We really have the chance to make a change,” he says.
To reach his goal he has had to work hard. His success might have been immediate, but it has not been for free. Kent Ngo’s workdays have been hard and unreasonably long. For periods of time, it has not been unusual for a day to start at school around eight o’clock in the morning and end with a meeting in the bus back home at two o’clock at night.
But despite his workload and success, Kent Ngo is not driven by money or a need for confirmation. What he returns to is the joy. The wish to learn more, understand and help. He doesn’t seem to know how to spell ’fame’, and he does not have a big bank account yet.
”I am moving forward by having been able to learn a lot and by the possibility to make the world a better place. To be able to help is a big motivation. There are people who have it very bad, and now we can do something about it”, he says.
When Kent Ngo finally remembered our interview and walked into the editorial office later during the week, I poured coffee and we made some jokes about his oversleep. Before the interview, he casually and fleetingly mentioned that he earlier this morning had denied interviews with both the Telegraph and the BBC – two of the world’s biggest news agencies. I was about to ask him if he was stupid, but I stopped immediately.
”Everything has its time. We start small and move on when the time is right,” says Kent Ngo, and makes himself ready to answer my questions.
Translation: Lars Jansson
