Social Entrepreneur Series – A food-saving supermarket [Food]

Social Entrepreneur – Terence Hon

Unlike ordinary stores or supermarkets, GreenPrice Supermarket specialises in selling “short-dated food” – food having passed the best-before date.

Two of the three founders are university students, yet they enjoy running a social enterprise and studying at the same time. “You enjoy many advantages as a student. You can be more flexible while practising your business skills,” grinned Terence Hon, Co-Founder & Business Development Manager of GreenPrice.

Terence was astonished by the serious food wastage problem in Hong Kong. In 2016, he teamed up with three partners in the idea competition organised by Good Seed. Making reference to foreign examples, they came up with an idea to resell food passed the best-before date to save edible food from the landfills. They finally picked a physical store considering its feasibility: it could attract traffic and could provide food tasting for customers to experience that short-dated food is perfectly safe to eat and tastes just as good. “Nevertheless, we were once accused of swindling, alleged for selling substandard goods. It took quite an effort to explain.”

More challenges such as high rents and unstable supplies follow as GreenPrice continues to expand its business. Terence, while battling rough tides, has a thought from his heart to share, “Don’t forget the calling of your heart. I always remind myself this social enterprise was founded to rescue food, solving social problems with innovative ideas. A sound business model is important, but never focus only on profits.”

Innovative Venture – GreenPrice

The innovative venture mentioned above is funded by the Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Fund and assisted and supported by the Fund’s intermediaries in project implementation.  The details of the innovative venture are as follows:

Name of Organisation: Green Price Limited

Service nature: Food

Beneficiary group: General

Project type: Prototype

Intermediary Programme: Good Seed

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What is Social Entrepreneur Series?

Stories of how other social entrepreneurs aspired to start their own business might facilitate your social innovation and entrepreneurship exploration.

A series of social entrepreneur stories will be featured and categorised into six sub-series: Education and Learning, Job Training and Opportunities, Community Participation, Healthcare, Food and Transport.  What you are going to read are stories of social entrepreneurs taking forward the startup projects that help themselves and others.