JT Solis spent years in e-commerce logistics, watching technology transform small businesses into successful enterprises. But he also witnessed how digitalization could leave entire segments of society behind — particularly in the Philippines’ agricultural sector, where farmers remained untouched by the technological revolution reshaping urban commerce.
“I saw that while technology can empower a certain segment of society, it can also, unfortunately, leave some others behind,” Solis explained in an interview with Sustainable Food Business. “Particularly the countryside.”
That observation led Solis and six co-founders to launch MAYANI in 2019, an agritech platform designed to connect smallholder farmers directly with institutional buyers while building climate resilience into the country’s fragmented food supply chain.
The founding team brought diverse expertise: a farmer with 30 years of experience, a full-stack software engineer who became CTO, a logistics expert, a lawyer, and a seasoned global entrepreneur. Together, they identified a sector plagued by massive post-harvest losses, expensive archipelago logistics across 7,600 islands, and low incomes among more than 10 million smallholder farmers considered among the country’s poorest.
“We felt that building technology and an agribusiness around smallholder empowerment particularly smaller farmers could actually become a viable enterprise, while at the same time enabling those who were left behind or untouched by technology to now be at the forefront of that particular digital storm,” Solis revealed.
Pandemic acceleration and investment
MAYANI’s initial business model focused on removing seven layers of middlemen between farmers and end consumers. The platform started with lowland vegetable farmers in Batangas province, bridging their produce to institutional markets in Metro Manila.
When COVID-19 hit, MAYANI faced the challenge of transporting fresh produce during lockdowns and mobility restrictions. “We started partnering with the Department of Trade and Industry to secure the necessary concurrence licenses and navigate through the different quarantine checkpoints during COVID,” Solis shared.
This crisis response accelerated growth, expanding both the farmer network and institutional buyer base. On top of that, it attracted impact-focused investors, including the Asian Development Bank, Japan’s JICA, Silicon Valley’s Plug and Play Ventures, and Philippine strategic investors. The company formally announced a seed funding round in 2023.
Today, MAYANI has built a grassroots network of over 144,000 smallholder farmers and fisherfolk across eight regions, from Luzon to Mindanao.
Cold chain investment in a tropical archipelago
The company invested in refrigerated trucks and IoT-powered storage facilities at its main fulfillment hub — a significant undertaking in a tropical country where maintaining freshness across island-to-island deliveries presents unique challenges.
“We started looking into this question: How do we increase our capability to deliver good quality produce at scale without the business breaking apart?” Solis said. “That’s when we shifted from being scrappy to professional.”
In 2024, strategic investments from Walmart and catalytic capital from Singapore’s Temasek Trust enabled further cold logistics improvements. This led to the installation of phase change materials (PCMs) in storage facilities, lowering electricity consumption by up to 35% compared to traditional cold storage.
“The door gets opened very frequently throughout the day. There’s going to be a fluctuation in temperature,” Solis explained. “The integrated cold technologies we installed allow us to maintain the temperature without continuously running the engine.”
The cold chain infrastructure enabled MAYANI to attract buyers demanding consistency, reliability, price competitiveness and high freshness standards. Current clients include major hotels, restaurant chains and supermarkets.
Building climate resilience through AgriKLIMA
Recognizing that climate vulnerability represents the weakest link in the Philippines’ food supply chain, MAYANI launched AgriKLIMA — a climate adaptation movement for smallholder farmers and fisherfolk. The Philippines experiences 20 to 25 typhoons annually, with extreme weather events capable of wiping out entire farmlands.
“Production in the Philippines is very vulnerable,” Solis shared. “If entire farmlands can actually be wiped out in a single snap because of these extreme weather events, we’ll probably end up in more scenarios of not being able to bring anything to the market. If we wanted to do something that could shape the current climate circumstances, we needed to make an active stride to empower our smallholder farmers.”
AgriKLIMA provides what Solis describes as both “mindset and toolset” interventions to farmer cooperatives and producer organizations. “It’s not just providing the mindset devoid of toolset, because that seems too hollow. But providing toolset devoid of mindset gives farmers tools that they aren’t trained to use. We provide both in a way that is replicable and scalable across the Philippines,” Solis explained.
The program trains groups on climate-smart agriculture practices, integrated pest management, water management, soil management, crop diversification, and cooperative governance. In 2025, HSBC funding catalyzed the movement to another level. MAYANI engaged 10 groups of smallholder farmers and fisherfolk in Zambales, Romblon, and the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, training them on sustainable practices while helping them establish organizational structures.
“This isn’t going to go away. It’s only going to get worse,” Solis said of climate volatility. “The way to equip them is to do it today, do it now, and accept that this is the new reality moving forward.”
Expanding into cage-free eggs and plant-forward menus
MAYANI’s whole-of-value-chain approach extends upstream to production standards, positioning the company to meet institutional buyers’ sustainability requirements. This capability has proven particularly relevant as hotels and restaurant chains seek cage-free egg suppliers.
The company supplies both cage-free eggs and fresh produce to support plant-forward advocacy among the Philippines’ top food brands. This came after chefs at major hotels provided feedback requesting cage-free egg transitions as guests increasingly inquire about supply chain practices.
“A lot of these food brands have committed with certain organizations to transition to cage-free or plant-forward menus, which are time-bound by specific years,” Solis explained. “We are a way to concretize that agenda. At the same time, because the majority of their volume is fresh produce, we’re able to help with their achievement of a plant-forward menu.”
MAYANI partnered with Lever Foundation, a nonprofit focused on improving farm animal welfare standards and promoting plant-based food systems in Asia, as a sustainable supply chain partner. This follows several hotel conglomerates’ commitments to provide at least 50 percent plant-forward menus across affiliates and subsidiaries, with some targeting 70 percent. The partnership will support both cage-free egg supply and plant-forward menu implementation across the Philippines’ top food brands.
While cage-free production remains at an early stage in the Philippines, MAYANI has engaged cage-free producers in Batangas and the Calabarzon area. Solis emphasized that production profiles follow market demand.
“The cage-free movement is thriving, but it’s still at an early stage and needs an additional boost to continue the momentum,” he said. Farmers participate because cage-free eggs command better pricing and provide recurring demand that sustains livelihoods.
Addressing post-harvest losses through ‘growership’
MAYANI introduced “growership”—a cooperative-based engagement using forward contracts to synchronize demand and supply. Here, farmers program planting based on pre-committed demand volumes and specifications, reducing the misalignment that contributes to post-harvest losses. Beyond preventing waste, this approach addresses methane emissions from food loss.
“We saw that a huge contributor to post-harvest loss was coming from the lack of alignment between what the market needs and what the farmers have started producing,” Solis explained. Through growership, “we engage them through forward contracts that allow them to program farming and production based on specific pre-committed demand volume.”
MAYANI also reduces food miles by shortening the traditionally long and convoluted supply chain. “Imagine it this way: The data says there’s an average of seven layers of middlemen between the farmer and the end consumer in the Philippines. Imagine how many trucks, how much fuel, how much energy has to be consumed just to pass on that food before it even gets to the table,” Solis shared.
Commercial viability meets sustainability
With many years in the industry, Solis has witnessed significant progress in how food companies approach sustainability. “There’s a huge shift now in how the large corporates and the food brands think of their supply chain,” he noted. Sustainability reporting has become mandatory for publicly listed companies in the Philippines, signaling systems-level adoption.
But the primary challenge he identifies is translating sustainability agendas into tangible commercial benefits for buyers who must balance environmental commitments with business mandates. “Being able to translate the sustainability agenda into tangible commercial benefits to these buyers — riding on a sustainability proposition can already get you far in terms of working and engaging these food buyers, but they also have a commercial mandate that they would need to uphold. Being able to bridge that gap is where we need to do a lot of work,” he said.
Still, Solis remains optimistic. “Sometimes the most innovative ideas fail not because they don’t work but because they don’t get adopted,” he observed. “Massive adoption and reaching a critical mass, I think, is the challenge right now. But I think we’re getting there.”
