Rethinking the systems we depend on, starting with coffee.

The turn

There was never an aha moment. Jenny Hsu had built a relatively successful career in tech, working with talented people, many of whom became lifelong friends. She was proud of being in health and biotech. She was also, by her own account, chronically burnt out.

"I had become unwell, mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually," she says. "I was climbing the career ladder like it was a professional sport, and doing that for a decade meant a lot of damage to work through." It came to a head during the most difficult period of her life, personally and professionally at the same time. "When you're completely dysregulated, you eventually hit rock bottom. And when you reach that point, you realise something needs to change."

I packed up my belongings into 18 boxes and left.Jenny Hsu, on the start of 2023

What she wanted was time and space to reconnect with herself. What she got, almost as a side effect, was permission to be curious about the things she had always dismissed. There had always been a voice, she says: "that's not going to make you money. That's not even a career, what will you do with that."

She went to Bali to volunteer and learn about permaculture. The cash ran out after a year, so she went back and got a normal job. Then she kept returning, month after month, year after year. "I felt alive working in nature, and that slowly planted the seeds for Omawild."

What it cost to start

"I gave up a lot of comfort, from every aspect of that word. I gave up physical, financial, social, and emotional." She is used to breaking into new industries, she says, but this was a different order of pivot: a complete beginner, no credentials, no network.

And she was doing it somewhere else entirely. "The worst part was that I was also rebuilding in an entirely new country, away from friends. The distance magnifies the loneliness of being an entrepreneur. That's been hard to grieve and accept, especially when you're in your thirties, at an age when the friends around you are buying homes and starting families. While everyone is starting to feel more established, I am feeling more unsettled. But that's part of starting over."

Not a coffee company

The first thing to understand about Omawild is how Jenny frames it. "Omawild is a food brand built around ecological restoration, and coffee is our starting point, but not our final destination."

Why food at all? Because we consume it every day and cannot survive without it, and because the way most of it is produced has become extractive. "It depletes our soils, biodiversity and the ecosystems that ultimately support all of us. That makes food and agriculture a really interesting place to work in if you care about environmental restoration, because we're not just giving back or restoring nature as an afterthought, but rethinking the systems we depend on."

As for why coffee specifically, she will not answer in print. There are three reasons, she says, and setting them out here would make this twice as long. "For those who are genuinely interested, I invite you to connect with me over coffee or a nature walk, and I'd be happy to share more."

What "regenerative" is allowed to mean

Jenny knows the word has been worn smooth by marketing, and she has a clear view on why that matters. "Regenerative has become a buzz word, but it is also the only way forward if we want to create a more liveable future." She points at this year's El Nino, which has not yet reached peak force, and at temperatures already past 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. "If we don't change, the future is going to look a lot more bleak, fairly quickly."

The problem, she says, is that regenerative describes a way of thinking about agriculture rather than one specific farming method, which means brands have to get much more specific about what they mean. Omawild looks for diverse native trees, multiple crops growing together, healthy ground cover, and soil that isn't constantly disturbed.

We don't want a field of coffee trees. We want to see coffee growing as part of a living system.Jenny Hsu

Then comes the part that is rare enough in a founder interview to be worth stopping on. There are standards Omawild cares about that it cannot yet verify independently, such as the absence of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. Comprehensive soil and residue testing costs money the company does not have.

"I don't want to pretend that we can verify something that we can't," she says. "Regenerative practices are not the same thing as proven ecological outcomes. We're still early in our sourcing relationships, and our ability to measure those outcomes will grow as Omawild does."

The standard she wants to be held to is simpler, and harder: "whether we can actually walk through the land we depend on and demonstrate that the system is becoming healthier. That's the standard we should be working towards."

The question that annoys her

We asked what the method costs her compared with farming conventionally: yield, years to first harvest, price per bag. Her answer opened with four words.

"This question pisses me off."

Not because it is rude, but because of what it smuggles in. "It assumes that conventional agriculture is the economic baseline, and regenerative agriculture is the more expensive alternative. But this is an accounting problem."

We have designed an accounting model, she argues, that makes conventional agriculture look cheap because it captures only the cost of producing the food, not the cost of the degrading system underneath it. "What happens to the soil? What happens to biodiversity? What happens to the water? What happens to the farmers? How about long-term land productivity? Those costs don't just disappear, but they don't show up on the balance sheet."

It borrows from our future to make today's production look efficient. It's a quick cash grab that leaves nothing for the future.Jenny Hsu, on conventional agriculture

She will concede the short-term picture: some regenerative practices do mean lower yields for a while, and more complexity. She will not concede the framing.

Everything is interconnected

Asked who else depends on the land, Jenny widens the frame immediately. "We think too narrow. This question goes beyond the people working directly on the land." The farmers and their families, yes. The birds, insects, wildlife and plant species in the ecosystem, yes. And then everyone else.

"Nature doesn't operate within the boundaries we draw on a map. Look at the forest fires across Europe or Indonesia this summer. The fires affect neighbouring countries. What happens to the soil, the forests, water, and species from one place have far greater consequences far beyond it."

Where she is right now

Early, and candid about it. Asked how close she has come to quitting, Jenny does not reach for a dramatic answer. "Quitting isn't really an option, because that means giving up on our future. But yeah, it's hard. It's really hard to get started."

The number she is trying to move in the next 90 days is deliberately unglamorous: one long-term partnership with a medium-sized office getting through roughly 15 to 25 kilos of coffee a month. "That would meaningfully move the needle for us and allow us to reinvest in the business and reinvest in conservation."

Which is where the rest of us come in.