About Us

Our philosophy

In a city state where 90% of our food is imported, there’s a perception that the best ingredients come from the furthest away.

But freshness, nutrition and flavour follow a different logic. The closer food is eaten from the moment it’s harvested, the more powerful it is. The world's best chefs build kitchen gardens beside their restaurants because they know this.

Heirloom Garden brings that thinking home, enabling premium, chef quality produce to be grown in any kitchen. Designed in Singapore, our stainless steel hydroponic microgreen grower is made in Japan by trusted manufacturers who share our values of craftsmanship and longevity.

Microgreens are uniquely suited to urban growing because they compress the distance between harvest and plate in a way no other crop can. They grow hydroponically, have a tiny footprint, and offer exceptional nutrient density.

About our founder

Hi there, I'm Christine, Heirloom Garden's founder and designer. 

Far from being a natural entrepreneur, I'm an accidental one. Running a small business was never my original plan. I studied a demanding course in university, and was the first person in my family to win a full undergraduate scholarship as well as be the top student in a Master's degree course. I had my whole life planned out year by year, but a long term chronic illness tore all my plans up, humbled me, and forced me to change course.

I learned the hard way that without health, you have nothing. I thought my body had let me down, and for many years I never forgave it for limiting what I thought I could achieve. 

When I moved back to Singapore after working abroad for over a decade, my IBS (one of the conditions that the chronic illness left me with) worsened.

Instead of being able to enjoy the local food I'd been craving for years, my body started to reject more and more types of food, leaving me with a highly restrictive diet.

The gastroenterologists I consulted were only able to offer symptomatic relief, so I extensively studied the latest gut health research and over a few years slowly and methodically reintroduced the food that my gut struggled with in smaller quantities until it was able to handle larger quantities. Fibre, whole grains, beans, seeds, fermented foods, and a larger variety of vegetables - all the things that even 'relatively healthy' local staples like chicken rice lack. 

During this period, I realised that rather than limiting me all along, my body had shut down during the times it did because it had been protecting me from the unreasonable demands I had placed on it.

Through my journey to better care for my body, there was one type of food the science talked about that intrigued and challenged me because I couldn't buy it easily: Microgreens!

The research shows that compared gram for gram, microgreens (the week-old versions of the same vegetables we eat daily) possess far more concentrated quantities of incredibly valuable phytonutrients than their fully grown vegetable older siblings. 

One example of phytonutrients like this is sulforaphane, found in cruciferous vegetables and discovered by Johns Hopkins researchers to have anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer benefits. The research shows that broccoli microgreens contain up to 40 x more sulforaphane than mature broccoli.

And because they are harvested minutes before you eat them, microgreens retain all their nutrients, unlike the nutrient loss you experience with imported mature vegetables that travel for miles and miles on a plane or lorry, sit on supermarket shelves for days and then slowly wilt in your fridge before you remember to cook them. 

However, the only way to access this incredibly powerful food group is to grow it yourself. 

The more I dug into the research, the more I was convinced that we aren't talking enough about the health, sustainability and food resilience benefits of growing microgreens globally. My experiments in growing microgreens at home made them a permanent part of my diet, but the existing microgreen growing systems and educational resources left a lot to be desired. 

I retrained in product design to design a microgreen grower without any quality compromises and to share what I've learned about the science, and that's how Heirloom Garden was born.

Thanks for coming with us on this journey, I look forward to meeting you at one of our in-person popups!