Patrick Struebi
A business and social entrepreneur, Patrick founded Fairtrasa: a company that lifts small-scale farmers out of poverty by providing them with technical know-how and linking them to local and international markets. Fairtrasa pioneered the first fair trade avocados in Mexico and then replicated its sustainable business model in Peru, Argentina, Chile and Brazil. Today, Fairtrasa represents over 5,000 farmers and has grown to become the largest fair trade and organic fruit exporter from Latin America with a vertically integrated business structure.
Patrick also co-founded and serves as Co-President of Blooom, a fully integrated human-centric AgTech platform that supports sustainable food supply chains from soil to shelf. Blooom gives smallholders access to cutting-edge information, finance and markets, and streamlines the work of cooperatives, companies, suppliers and other stakeholders that interact with them. Blooom's smart farming algorithm operates at an unprecedented depth, enabling smallholders to do precision agriculture on the smallest plot of land, anywhere in the world. Blooom disrupts the conventional food supply chain. It eliminates intermediaries, and enables farmers to get fair prices for their produce by selling directly to local and international markets through the app, while creating new, entrepreneurial jobs in rural communities.
Patrick is an Ashoka Fellow, an Endeavor Entrepreneur, and was named “Social Entrepreneur of the Year” in Mexico in 2009 (Visionaris), and two times in 2012 by the abc* foundation and Univision. He was also named a Schwab Foundation Entrepreneur of the Year in 2014.