We were lucky to catch up with Andy Jo recently and have shared our conversation below.

Andy, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.

In 2019 I moved to NYC and quickly adapted my weekend routine to include Saturday visits to the Brooklyn farmers market for grocery shopping and, most importantly, to drop off my food waste of the week – which had spent all week in my freezer. This small action of love for the planet became such a core part of my week that upon coming back to South Florida in 2021, the realization of a complete lack of alternatives to continue my commitment to diverting food waste from landfills filled me with frustration.

My freezer continued to be full of frozen food scraps with nowhere to go. Google searches yielded only impractical options of driving 45+ mins from my home in Kendall to find a food waste drop off location. After weeks of frustrating searches and questions to my network, I asked myself “am I the only one with this problem?” Turns out…I was not. I quickly went through a number of social media comments and blog posts expressing the same frustration I felt – no solution for a practical way to address food waste that wouldn’t clash with our home aesthetic.

So on a Wednesday night in 2022, I texted one of my best friends and asked “would you have any interest in a composting business?”

Two weeks later, Soilmate was born. We sought out to create an easy, affordable, and practical way to compost residential food waste. Within a month we encountered a growing demand from South Florida residents, and within a few months we evolved to serve the business community who desperately searched for ways to align their business practices to their sustainability values. We have found a niche that is rapidly becoming the mainstream in people seeking for easier and systemic ways to address climate change – and found composting is one of the best ways to do so.

Now, we have invested our personal resources, leveraged private capital and are fully committed to growing into a solid infrastructure that can support Miami-Dade County, and South Florida in general, in addressing the solid waste crisis.

Andy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Soilmate is a Florida-based composting operation, with primary focus in Miami-Dade and Broward County, serving residential, commercial, and event-based members. We are committed to diverting food waste and compostable products from landfills and to making nutrient-rich fertilizer that can be utilized in agriculture and gardens instead.

We aim to return food waste to its rightful place: the soil. Food waste was once born in the soil and is destined to return. Soilmate gives the tools and resources everyone needs to help the environment.
Everything we do follows our values:
• Practicality: you can depend on us to make composting easy and accessible.
• Committed: we care about you, your time, and the environment. That’s why we are
dedicated to finding solutions for your needs.
• Empowering: inspiring people to be kinder to the environment. We want to bring
awareness to the problems and help everyone solve them.
• Refreshing: the environment is a serious topic, and we do take it seriously, but we
also want to address it in a manageable way – not overwhelm you.

Our services are subscription-based and provide:
• Education: easy-to-follow guides, training for business staff, workshops and school programs.
• Flexibility: multiple routes 5 days / week to adapt to different lifestyles and needs.
• Cost-effective alternative: composting may replace some of business waste disposal costs.
• 100% clean-bin guarantee: bins are replaced at every pickup to prevent pests and odors.
• Responsive customer service: our team is available via chat, email and phone to help.
• Impact reports: we send you how many pounds of food waste you have diverted from landfills plus the equivalent impact on our environment!

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

Our small-but-mighty team always had high hopes for our growth and future – and still, we were amazed when we encountered large opportunities like the Miami Heat. We have found that a relentless attention to detail, focus on customer satisfaction and going above and beyond to solve our customers’ sustainability needs have differentiated us and opened doors we never imagined possible at this stage of our story.

First conversations with the Miami Heat originally cemented our focus on commercial composting, growing our infrastructure to serve larger-scale businesses that require flexibility and a true sustainability partner. However, at that point we did not end up setting up service at the arena.

Since then and over the next months, we grew our commercial portfolio serving food stores, restaurants, flower shops, schools until an opportunity to work with the Miami Heat came back around. We have been lucky to collaborate with a team in the Miami Heat who are truly committed to delivering an excellent fan experience while protecting our planet and adapting overarching practices in Kaseya Center to divert as much waste from landfills as possible. Today, we support the arena in testing products in their supply chain, composting food waste and compostable products used by fans, and pushing sustainability practices across their events.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

Business partnerships are not unlike personal commitments – it requires work, transparency, trust and lots and lots of communication. Jessie and I met in college and quickly became close friends, supporting each other through the ups and downs of personal and professional experiences. Despite having different professional focuses (her a therapist, me in business), we met each other in the middle with quick-witted jokes and sarcasm as a survival skill.

It had never crossed my mind that her and I would end up being as good a team as we are today. We have always shared a practical approach to sustainability, committing effort to lower our negative impacts on our planet while avoiding getting overwhelmed by the doom-rhetoric that accompanies the subject in many mediums. The night the idea hit me – she was my only text before I went to sleep. She was the obvious choice: responsible, passionate, practical and just crazy enough to take this leap with me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.your-soilmate.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yoursoilmate