With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1471305
S A N G L Ê & A R I E L L E L O K AGES: 22 + 20 Co-founders, Peko Produce LIFE STORY: At age 11 in her native Vietnam, Sang Lê started a newspaper for preteens and sold it at school. Arielle Lok, who was born in Hong Kong, became a children's rights advocate after moving to Cal- gary in 2010. Spending much of her time lobbying on Parliament Hill, she was part of the group that drafted Canada's first Children's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The two met in 2020, when Lê, earning a commerce degree from UBC Sauder School of Business, was participating in the Next 36 national entrepreneurship incubator. Lok, who was studying finance at McGill University, got introduced to her by a friend in the program. Hitting it off instantly, the two began talking about food waste, which had bothered Lê since she moved from Vietnam and started cooking her own meals. "I wanted to explore the space a bit more and learned that this problem is much bigger than myself," she says. "Food is wasted from the farm to the wholesaler all the way to the retailer and the fridge." JULY/AUGUST 2022 BCBUSINESS 37 BCBUSINESS.CA Lê and Lok's first project was a mobile app that tracked food expiry dates. But they soon shifted to imper- fect or surplus fruit and vegetables, most of which gets thrown away in Canada. The result was Vancouver- based retailer Peko Produce, whose name is short for "peculiar." Lê and Lok launched the business, which exploits inefficiencies in the food supply chain, last year by finding their first wholesale suppliers at farmers markets. Picking and packing from Lê's basement suite at first, they met Kyle Tom of North American Produce Sales, who let Peko move into his company's cold produce warehouse. BOTTOM LINE : Tackling food waste, food insecurity and rising inflation, Peko delivers 12-pound- plus boxes of fruit and vegetables to customers' doors for $25, or as much as 40 percent off grocery store prices. The company had rescued some 100,000 pounds of produce as of April, and its patrons had saved about $350,000. During the previous 10 months, Lê and Lok received $80,000 in funding from competi- tions. Although they've had several offers from investors to help scale the business, the two are waiting until graduation to work on Peko full-time. Looking ahead, Lê and Lok want their company to be a national player focused on sustainable groceries. For example, Lok says, a bottle of olive oil with a label facing the wrong way will typically go to waste. "It's finding all of these different kinds of wastages when it's perfectly good food and distributing it to people who need it the most." –N.R. R Y D E R D A V I S AGE: 26 Co-founder + CEO, Heathrow Security LIFE STORY: Ryder Davis doesn't give off the vibe of someone who works around the clock to run a company hitting $300,000 in monthly revenues. He's about as calm, cool and collected as possible, even when talking about why he got into security in the first place. "We had one incident where our house was broken into," he recalls of his Surrey home. Although it was over a decade ago, the break-in left an impression on him. "The gentle- man that came in afterwards was an alarm installer and he decked out our entire house with security equip- ment. After that, I would go to sleep each night with peace of mind." As a 22-year-old, it wasn't easy to convince people that he was capable of securing their multimillion- dollar construction site. "I didn't even have peach fuzz on my face," he says with a laugh. At the time, Davis was studying economics at UVic while setting up the security license for Heathrow Security. It was actually his mom's entrepreneurial spirit that inspired him to dive in and officially launch it with Caleb Nasadyk in 2017. A member of the Qalipu Mi'kmaq First Nation, Davis also acts as CEO of RWC Industries, an Indigenous-led medical supply store in Surrey that sells and manufactures personal pro- tective equipment ( PPE) and safety gear. RWC has been committed to providing vulnerable Indigenous com- munities and seniors with N95 masks and rapid antigen tests throughout the pandemic, and it has sold 1.5 million masks and PPE to date. BOTTOM LINE : Surrey-based Heathrow Security started off with two guards and some $60,000 in 2018 revenue. The business now has 80 employees, is projected to bring in $5 million at the end of 2023, and is equipped with software from Montreal-based TrackTik that tracks GPS locations of guards on site and sends out prompt reports. Clients are able to see real-time incidents like floods and fires through the app. "We expect a seven-minute police arrival time," Davis says. "Our false alarm rate is way down, so it's almost a 100 percent guarantee that it's a trespassing alert." –R.R. Arielle Lok and Sang Lê Ryder Davis