Nancy Tran, Co-founder & CEO, Medifood, Vietnam

Today’s episode is with Nancy Tran, Co-founder and CEO of Medifood.io, Vietnam. Medifood started by supplying organic vegetables on a subscription basis but now produces healthy rice crispy snacks that are sold via subscription boxes.  Besides producing for Vietnam, her rice crispy snacks are now available in North America. Prior to founding the business, Nancy was as market analyst at VNDIRECT Securities and marketing team lead at VEAS Exhibition & Advertising Services with focus on developing markets such as Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam in the agriculture sector.  Nancy started Medifood in 2016 because she was passionate about healthy eating and helping Vietnamese farmers earn a better living except that she didn’t know a thing about agriculture and organic farming. In today’s episode, she talks about the struggles of farming and why farmers ate chemical-free vegetables while they supplied chemical-laden vegetables to the market. She talks about the separate plot of land that farmers kept to grow their own organic vegetables for their family’s needs. She started by buying these organic produce and selling them to the city.  While she grew a community of enthusiastic believers in organic farming from buyers to farmers, she couldn’t make the business work. She was underpricing her vegetables and the work was tough. In the end, she decided to pivot from her original idea to manufacturing food products using organic ingredients grown by the local farmers.  Today, Medifood is a platform where you buy tasty and nutritious snacks and still help local farmers sustain themselves through organic and natural farming. For the full show notes and links, visit WomenpreneurAsia.com This episode is brought to you by Redbox Studio.