As more gardeners embrace organic, sustainable and regenerative horticulture practices, retailers still view organic gardening products as niche. My guests this week, Back to the Roots co-founders and co-CEOs Nikhil Arora and Alejandro “Alex” Vélez, are working to change that by making organic gardening easy and affordable.
The last time I saw Nikhil and Alex was 10 years ago during a Season 4 episode of my public television show “Growing a Greener World.” They had succeeded with their mushroom growing kit and had just launched their countertop aquaponics kit. Their headquarters is still located in Oakland, California, but their business has grown exponentially, now offering seeds, soil, fertilizer, microgreens, raised planters, and much more.
An African proverb comes to mind when I think of the successful partnership and mutual respect between Nikhil and Alex: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
How Back to the Roots Began
With no experience in farming, gardening, or mushrooms, Nikhil and Alex started their business during their final semester at UC Berkeley in 2009. They had both planned to enter the corporate world after graduation, and Alex even had a job offer in New York and a signed lease. However, with just three months until graduation, they clung to something their business ethics professor had said in class: mushrooms can be grown from waste coffee grounds.
Nikhil and Alex each separately contacted their teacher, who didn’t even remember where he heard this fact. Nonetheless, the professor connected Nikhil and Alex, who both loved the idea of growing food from waste. They started growing mushrooms in their dormitory.
The duo received a $5,000 grant from their chancellor and left their careers in investment banking and consulting to pursue urban mushroom farming. They collected coffee grounds from local cafes and grew fresh mushrooms to sell at farmers’ markets and directly to restaurants. Within a few years, they were selling 500 pounds of mushrooms a week and giving demonstrations at farmers’ markets and other venues.
Nikhil said they were most excited when they could teach people how to grow their own food, and people were most excited when they could come to the mushroom farm and take something home to try growing something themselves. This inspired them to create indoor mushroom growing kits.
“Our goal is to try to allow every home, every classroom to experience the same growth magic,” Nikhil recalls.
Their first mushroom growing kit was quickly followed by their aquaponics kit. Today, they also sell STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) gardening kits for kids, as well as peat-free organics and many other organic products.
From the beginning, Nikhil and Alex knew their business would go beyond growing mushrooms. That’s why they called their business Back to the Roots.
“We may not have been able to express it at the time, but we knew there was something bigger here, something that wasn’t just about mushrooms,” says Nikhil.
Learn from the best
When they were looking for other ways to grow food and wanted to learn more about aquaponics, they visited Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Founded by former professional basketball player Will Allen, Growing Power operated the last farm inside the city limits of Milwaukee, complete with greenhouses, outdoor grow spaces and aquaponics systems.
Nikhil and Alex also worked with Sir Jony Ive, who designed the iPhone, to reduce the size of an aquaponics system and make it more accessible. When I visited ten years ago, they had their first prototype in hand. They put the concept on Kickstarter with a goal of $100,000 and ended up raising $250,000 through pre-orders on Kickstarter, then another $250,000 through their website.
“We realized we weren’t a mushroom company,” says Nikhil. “We are truly a gardening company.”
Their aquaponics system, called the Back to the Roots Water Garden, won the Guggenheim Industrial Design Award.
“What it taught us in our 20s was that the product is everything, number one,” Alex says. “Number two is not just the product, but how to think about the product.”
They also worked closely with Daylight Design on how to think about future decades of products their company might offer.
Nikhil points out that when they created the Water Garden and their mushroom growing kit, they created new product categories and taught people things that had never existed before.
He notes that they can’t assume that an answer that was true 20 years ago is still true for a new generation today. Their gardening product is not limited to the amount of tomatoes that can be grown. “But what does this product do for people, and what are they really buying with this product?” he said. “And we started to realize that our products are a way for families to come together and connect.”
You really can’t find your way until you know your why. When Alex and Nikhil discovered their why, it set them on the path to running a $100 million retail brand today.
Nick says their key question is: “How can we get more and more people to reconnect with the land, with their food?”
They also seek to embed the highest standards of organic and regenerative agriculture into their brand DNA, while remaining accessible.
A counterweight to screens and an alternative to conventional gardening
Nikhil points out that their products rose to prominence as screens and technology started popping up everywhere. “In a way, this brand has been a counterbalance to that too,” he says.
Their products help people connect with nature, the earth and their food, he says.
When I started promoting gardening 30 years ago, my intention was to raise awareness of sustainability, environmental conservation and organic growing. But back then, using synthetic chemicals was the norm. Everyone was waiting for a simple answer and a quick solution: What can I spray to kill this weed or insect? How do I grow something in my garden?
At that time, no one really thought about how to do this in harmony with nature. How do you do it ethically, so as not to make the earth worse than it was? Today I think we…
