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Organicus, an online farm from Togliatti, has made a contract with Pyaterochka retail chain to supply sprout salads. At the moment, Organicus is raising money for its further development by issuing cryptotokens. It thus expands its production to supply its products to major retail chains, as Roman Moiseev, Organicus’ CEO, announced at a conference on digital economy which took place in the Council of Federation (upper chamber of the Russian parliament).

Organicus and major retail stores

Yuri Rabukhin

In 2015, Sun Planet and Analytica Insight joined forces to implement Farm Online project. Thus Organicus came into being. Organicus is a producer of salads from sprout seeds. Organicus’ main production facilities are located in Togliatti. Still, works are also underway to launch production in Simferopol (Crimea) and Moscow Region. Sprout salads are very healthy products, they are grown from peas, Jerusalem peas, lentil, and sunflower seeds. When Analytica Insight joined the project in 2015, such salads were only available at smaller retail chains such as Glavproduct, Trading and Mindal.

In 2016, the salads from Organicus were on sale in Auchan and Lenta, in 2017 in Perekrestok and Azbuka Vkusa, in 2018 in Karusel supermarkets. This year, sprout salads will also be sold at Pyaterochka, Russia’s largest retail chain. In late May, an agreement was signed with Pyaterochka on supply of sprout salads to 1,200 shops of the retailer.

Sun Planet was registered in Samara Region by Stalislav Rabukhin, a local businessman, and is now managed by his son Yuri Rabukhin. The company also has a subsidiary, Volzhskiye Berega Biofarm.

Analytica Insight comes from Chelyabinsk and is involved with applied blockchain projects. It developed a token for Business Molodost (Business Youth) community (which raised $1.5 mio at its ICO), and Timebroker token. According to Kontur.Focus service, the shareholders of the company are its CEO Roman Moiseev (50%) and the South Ural State University.

‘With the sprouts, your profits are growing’

The project is financed by investors who are offered to grow organic salads online and get either dividends or fresh salads. The facilities are equipped with CCTV cameras, and their videofeed is then stored at blockchain. A project participant is thus able to observe the seeds growing process and get regular production reports. It takes seven days for salads to grow. A project participant has a smart contract at Ethereum blockchain which allows buying Grass tokens and renting a sown area. One square meter of the area equals one token which is priced at RUR 2,000 ($ 31).

Grass tokens were first issued in March and that in fact became a short term loan for the salads producer. The number of the tokens was linked to the area available. At that moment, the area was 800 square meters. Hence 800 tokens were issued. One square meter allows producing 40 packages of salads a month, with each package generating profit of RUR 10 to 15. The entire salad growing process up to its delivery to a store is digitalized with the hashtags stored in a blockchain.

As Roman Moiseev puts it, “Tokens permit taking part in the Ogranicus project from any place of the globe and monitoring the salads production process remotely”.

Extended scales

Roman Moiseev

The salad project was first presented at a blockchain summit in Sochi last March with all tokens sold out in a day. In Sochi, Roman Moiseev reached an agreement with Sam Lee, a Chinese investor and brother of Juwan Lee, head of cryptocurrencies and blockchain association of Hong Kong, on building a production facility in China to produce four million packages of salad a month. It is anticipated the works to build new facilities will start this autumn. Equipment for it has been purchased and is now undergoing tests and adjustment.

Over the last three months Organicus expanded its sprout salads production from 30K to 90K packages a month. Yet the recent contract with Pyaterochka requires its further increase to 180K packages monthly. This year the online farm will be capable of producing salads worth RUR 107 mio while investment funds are ready to provide financial facilities of dozens of millions of dollars.

The company has plans to build in 2018 facilities in Kyrgyzstan to process mountain nuts and fruit and to manufacture chocolate bars. There are 600,000 hectares of organic walnut trees growing in the highlands out there. Yet for the nuts to be picked up, the money is to be paid in advance, before the season starts. That helps to drive the price down by 30 to 40% as compared to the wholesale prices. To get funds for that, one million tokens will be sold at a private placement. Each token will be priced at $5. The issuer will be registered in Switzerland and a walnut token will equal one share in it.

Besides, Organicus has made a contract with a company operating drones. It will supply constant video feed of the woods to the investors with the recordings stored in blockchain. This year, 1,000 tons of walnuts will be processed in Kyrgyzstan. The project is substantially larger than the previous one. Launching sprout salads production took $2 mio investments whereas nuts processing will require $30 mio to $40 mio investments.

By Natalia Kuznetsova

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