Growing pure food at city homes

"Years back, people used to have small farms in their backyards," said Kazuho Komoda, a Japanese, co-founder of Alesca Life Technologies Co Ltd, an agricultural technology startup in Beijing. "Now people live in the sky, and city center real estate prices are too expensive to be used for farming."

With no previous experience in agriculture, Komoda and his core team of former bankers and traders founded the urban soilless cultivation company in 2013, in the country's busiest city, aiming to grow safe, sustainable and accessible food with maximum efficiency, including use of specially designed containers, a product of Alesca.

"Traditional farms are farther and farther away from city centers. People use trucks and even airplanes to deliver food to city centers, causing food waste during transportation; and transportation itself is environmentally unfriendly."