‘Organic In The Concrete Jungle'

Geologist-turned-entrepreneur Brad Meiring uses an online delivery service in South Africa to get people to reconnect with their food.

- Gypseenia Lion

PILES OF EMPTY WOODEN crates are ready for packaging, stacked up in a scullery. As the morning mist dissipates in the lawn, a pick-up van parks near the doorway.

There is an enterprising hustle and bustle between the van and the kitchen door. Men hurriedly create an impromptu conveyor belt offloading supplies from the van into the scullery.

The daily work rituals progress, and Brad Meiring, the 37-year-old founder of Munching Mongoose, casually engages in a conversation with the supplier.

From starting his business with 12 boxes, the online delivery service established in 2014, now dispatches about 150 boxes a week in Johannesburg.

Meiring sells customizable grocery boxes filled with organic produce, from fruits and vegetables to staple foods such as milk, cheese and breads. His business has a turnover of R450,000 ($31, 241) a month.

It was a conversation at a dinner with a friend in Nelspruit that planted the seed of opportunity. It turned him from geologist to entrepreneur.

As a geologist, he had been against the commercial exploitation of the environment.

“In geology, it is about how we can put a big hole in the ground to make us some money. That didn’t sit well with me and that is why I geared away [from

it]. You are very much in touch with the ground and so is farming. I suppose you could link the two. When I shifted from geology, I tried to get into the environmental field using that knowledge,” the entrepreneur says.

Operating from a pomegranate farm, in the picturesque rural area of Muldersdrift, 27 kilometers from Johannesburg, the calm of the place is an obvious contrast to the hustle and bustle in the economic hub of big city Johannesburg.

It is a contrast he sees changing with time, as people have become more open-minded to experimenting with healthier options, his packaged organic food one of them.