Revolution Farm & Kitchen, a modest venture whose own growth was nourished in a side room of a Dublin house, has now joined forces with UCD Innovation Academy, which was quick to recognize its message and values.
“I don’t know if we’re doing [urban farming] as well as, say, other countries, but I think there’s certainly an appetite for it,” says Paddy Arnold, the 36-year-old gastro entrepreneur whose ambitions of opening a restaurant, derailed by Covid-19, were quickly turned to tackling agricultural solutions.
There is certainly an appetite for his produce. A rapidly developed, if modest, business, Revolution began churning out sauces from its own stock of oyster mushrooms. The coffee granules were bagged up at a Ranelagh cafe and used to grow the mushrooms, which were used to make the sauce which was fed back to the same cafe and others.
Arnold, together with business partner James Egan (36), initially began experimenting on a small scale in 2020 before moving their concoctions to grow bags and eventually to a 45ft retrofitted truck container.
“There’s a lot of waste in kitchens, a lot of food waste, and maybe there are ways to [address] that, so that was really my focus, and I had some time to think up some ideas and research some various things,” says Arnold of the motivation behind the company. “We came across this idea of growing mushrooms from coffee grounds.”
After beginning to sell their sauces, the duo were looking for a home to park their container farm when the UCD Innovation Academy came calling.
Read the entire article in the Irish Times