The man trying to fix Pakistan's broken food supply chain

From pre-med to computer engineer by accident

The episode opens with Muzamil explaining why he chased this particular guest. He has been tracking Pakistan’s agriculture supply chain for some time and wanted to understand what educated, commercially minded people are actually doing about it. Rafael Llerena, CEO of Easy Fresh, turned out to be exactly that person.

Rafael’s own path to the agriculture sector was anything but direct. He grew up in Islamabad, completed his A-levels in 2000, and had every intention of becoming a doctor. He sat the admission test for GIK on a whim — some friends were going, so he tagged along. GIK’s offer came first. When he tried to back out, the rector told him that if he walked away, a seat that another student had wanted would go to waste for four years. The money, in any case, was not going to be refunded. “I let me tell you that engineering is great,” the rector told him. Rafael did not entirely believe it at the time, but he stayed. He graduated in computer engineering, joined P&G in IT, and spent two years designing supply chain solutions before deciding he wanted to work in brand management. That meant LUMS for an MBA.

Forty-eight rejections and a PTCL strike

The MBA did not immediately open doors. Rafael failed forty-eight job interviews, including thirteen at what is now Jazz. The Jazz VP eventually issued what amounted to a standing order: if this person is seen on our floor again, whoever recommended him gets fired. Rafael describes this period with a kind of amused candour. He was so desperate that he began walking into offices door to door, handing CVs to receptionists who told him they would call. They did not call.

His break came at PTCL. He walked up to the building in G-8, was turned away by the guard, went back to the parking lot for five or ten minutes, then returned. An MBA from LUMS, immediately available. The officer’s eyes lit up. That same day, PTCL workers were on strike, blockading the main entrance. Rafael pushed through anyway. He got the interview. He got the job. From there he moved into brands at Zong, then spent the bulk of eight years at Jazz across different roles, before leaving in 2016 for Stanford’s MSX programme — a one-year business degree for people with at least ten to fifteen years of experience.

Stanford, a startup grant, and Moka Online

Muzamil asks what the Stanford year was actually like. “Incredible,” Rafael says. He was the only Pakistani and the only Muslim in the programme, sitting alongside CEOs and US military officers. The scale of thinking on offer was unlike anything he had encountered before. He came back with a seed grant — a competitive, one-hundred-thousand-dollar award from Stanford’s business school competition — and launched Moka Online, an on-demand domestic help platform.

Moka ran for almost four years. At its peak, it was sending a hundred to a hundred and fifty helpers to people’s homes every day, and still could not meet demand. The hardest part was never demand. It was supply: hiring, onboarding, training, and deploying workers who had no baseline of professional reliability. Rafael tells a story about the very first helper they hired. She had no working clock in her home. Her phone’s time was broken. They told her to be ready at eight in the morning. When they arrived, she was not ready. They eventually bought her an alarm clock. That alarm clock became a standard item in every starter pack they gave new helpers.

The deeper problem, Rafael argues, is structural. “The root cause in my opinion is generally us Pakistanis have not been trained well on professionalism from the start of our lives.” He contrasts this with a Filipino nanny his family later hired, who had been taught childcare, plumbing, and electrical basics in high school as part of a deliberate national policy to prepare workers for international employment. The gap is not talent. It is the absence of any system that takes upskilling seriously.

COVID and other pressures eventually shut Moka down. Rafael spent two months at Airlift, learned about fresh produce logistics, and then — despite telling himself he was done with startups — co-founded Easy Fresh.

The broken economics of Pakistan’s agriculture supply chain

Muzamil has been interested in the agriculture supply chain for some time before this conversation. He frames the problem clearly: Pakistan grows a great deal but wastes a great deal, and the people who actually farm are among the most economically trapped in the country.

Rafael maps the value chain. After the farmer come the arthis — commission agents, a role dating to the British era, who sit in the mandi and facilitate trade between farmers and buyers. Then the mandi itself, where wholesalers break bulk and sell to retailers, who travel there at night and carry produce back to their shops. By the time a tomato reaches a retailer, the farmer’s price and the retail price differ by roughly fifty percent. The arhtis, mandis, and distributors collectively account for another six to eight percent in fees. And then there is the waste: “Post-harvest losses in agriculture in our country, upwards of 35%. For a country our economic standing to lose thirty-five percent of your agriculture output — you waste it — just because your supply chain is inefficient, is criminal.”

The arhtis, Rafael is careful to say, are not simply villains. They provide financing to farmers who cannot afford fertiliser or tractor costs on their own. They show up at weddings and when children fall ill. They carry political weight. “Initially we also used to bad-mouth him, but now we consider him a necessary evil. He is there, and without him the wheels of this ecosystem would not move.” Easy Fresh’s current posture is to work around the arhtis rather than against them, focusing on farmers who are large enough or financially independent enough to transact directly.

How Easy Fresh actually works

Easy Fresh operates in Islamabad and Karachi. It moves about a hundred tons of fresh produce per day across both cities. The model is closer to a mandi than to a technology platform at this stage — the team physically sources from farmers, brings produce to sorting centres, grades it, and delivers daily to retailers, including street vendors.

The north star metric is not tonnage or revenue. It is the number of farmers transacted with on a given day. “What we’ve learnt is that these complex supply chains are actually led by the sourcing, by the supply side. You put sourcing into your value chain, it sells.” The demand side — retailers, food delivery platforms, even export clients — follows once the supply is reliable and consistent.

Muzamil asks whether Easy Fresh is trying to be a marketplace where farmers and retailers transact directly, or whether it is more like an Airlift-style operation where the company physically moves goods. Rafael says it is a progression. Today, Easy Fresh has to be physically present because it has no brand recognition with the millions of farmers it has not yet reached. The thousand-plus farmers who have transacted with Easy Fresh trust it. But there are millions more. “So to reach all of them, right now you have to physically do transactions.” The long-term ambition is a platform where farmers and retailers find each other, with Easy Fresh providing quality assurance, logistics, and payment infrastructure.

The value proposition to the retailer is straightforward: produce delivered to the shop door at mandi-equivalent prices, with better quality and no transport cost. “You’ll get much more value for your money. Quality will be better for the same price, and you’ll get it delivered to your doorstep.” Delivery is free. The retailer saves the daily cost of sending someone to the mandi — three to four hundred rupees a day, by Rafael’s estimate — and gets fresher produce because Easy Fresh harvests closer to delivery time. Where a traditional mandi supply chain might take forty-eight to seventy-two hours from farm to shop, Easy Fresh aims to cut that significantly by harvesting near sunset and delivering overnight.

The FarmDar partnership and the export opportunity

Easy Fresh partners with FarmDar, a satellite imaging company, to identify which crops are worth sourcing. Rafael explains the exchange: Easy Fresh has on-ground teams in potato-growing regions of central Punjab — Depalpur, Basirpur, areas twenty to thirty minutes from the Indian border. FarmDar gets access to farmers through Easy Fresh’s network. Easy Fresh gets better information about crop quality before committing to a purchase. The farmer gets higher margins and, increasingly, feedback about what export markets actually want.

That export feedback loop matters. Easy Fresh has already exported branded mangoes and potatoes to Dubai and Sri Lanka under its own export licence. “We go to the same farmers. We pick up the produce from them. We grade it ourselves, we pack it ourselves. So then whether we’re selling to retail, or to food delivery platforms, or to Dubai’s market — it’s the same operation.” Green vegetables go by air. Potatoes go in refrigerated containers. The margins on export justify the shipping cost in a way that domestic fresh produce does not yet justify refrigerated trucking.

Muzamil raises the mango example — that Pakistani mangoes are excellent but arrive in export markets in random sizes, in dirty crates, and fail quality checks. Rafael agrees the responsibility for sorting and packing cannot fall on the farmer, who lacks the machinery and facility. But the farmer absolutely knows which variety will pass an export inspection. “For example, potato — if too much fertiliser is applied, dots appear on the surface and it won’t be accepted. If not at your own port, then at Dubai’s port it will be stopped and the entire shipment will be wasted.” Easy Fresh works with farmers on input management before harvest, and in return commits to buying the entire produce at a better rate and shipping it directly from the farm gate.

Profitability, team size, and the funding question

Later in the discussion, Muzamil asks about the financial health of the business. Easy Fresh has been unit-economics positive from day one and is, at the time of recording, a couple of months away from full profitability. The team is around fifty core staff across both cities, plus sixty to seventy warehouse workers. Investors include Sena Capital, Devsaay, and MAGM, along with a number of angels. Rafael declines to give a funding number, calling it “a vanity metric — an ego thing for the founder.”

On the broader funding environment, he is pragmatic. “The general environment is that this is no time to raise. If you get money, of course, bismillah. But generally what we’re trying to do is build towards our full profitability goal, which is right around the corner.”

Pakistan in twenty-eight years

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Rafael the question he puts to all his guests: how do you see Pakistan in 2050? Rafael’s answer is grounded in what he has seen from the inside of the agriculture sector. “As a nation, we’re very resilient. We’ve been progressing. This isn’t the same Pakistan that was ten years ago.” He is particularly encouraged by educated people — bankers, professionals — who are now leasing farmland in Sindh and experimenting with regenerative farming. Entrepreneurs are opening trucking companies, farming operations, and technology businesses. “All of this is going to take the country forward.”

His one honest worry is pace. Whether Pakistan’s rate of growth will match regional peers is an open question. But the fundamentals — a young population, strong technology adoption, talented young workers — give him genuine confidence. “Pakistan in twenty, twenty-two years, if we’re alive, we’ll be enjoying it.”