#hamama

How it Grows

If only fresh food would grow itself. With HAMAMA it basically does. Add three cups of water and a Seed Quilt to the tray, and your harvest is ready for munching in 7-10 days. No additional watering. No mess. No upkeep. It’s a simple way to get fresh food grown by your own hands.

How it Works

The HAMAMA Grow Kit comes with a durable tray, instructions, and three Seed Quilts of your choosing. The Seed Quilts are engineered to create the perfect environment. The Seed Quilt combines everything your seeds need to grow into ready to eat microgreens. Choose from hearty broccoli, spicy daikon radish, super salad mix, sweet wheatgrass, and refreshing cabbage.

About Microgreens

Microgreens are the seedling versions of vegetables and herbs. They are similar to sprouts, but more mature. Microgreens are more nutritiously dense and flavorful than vegetables you’ll find at home or the grocery store. This is why they are an amazing addition to every meal. The founders of HAMAMA recommend adding microgreens to “sandwiches, omelettes, stir fries, salads, smoothies - you name it.” And just like you, your pets can eat them too.

About the Founders

Camille and Dan were students at MIT when they began to build things together. As mechanical engineers interested in creating a positive impact, they worked on indoor agriculture projects at the MIT Media Lab right out of college. This led them to think about how to provide food technology to all of us at home. After leaving the lab, and after many complex designs, they found that simple was robust. This is when they came up with the HAMAMA Grow Kit we see today - simple to use and simple to eat.

Click here to get a discount for your very own HAMAMA microgreens growing kit.  

WHAT IS THIS THING? WHAT'S ALL THIS THEN?

HAMAMA! is a manga that I've been working on since November 2023, releasing the first chapter back in January (under Shrine Comics). It also acts as a continuation of the OG WEBTOON version of the series. Why did I make it? In 2018, I felt the desire to do a character design challenge for myself where I made an all-girls fighting game roster and it devolved into this.

What's it actually about? People of this world got superpowers, which are called "stains". Professional fighting is the biggest sport to showcase those powers, but it was made illegal in the city of Santana back in 1998. But one of the sport's biggest athletes (named KC) decides to bring the sport back in 2018, with a whole new tournament called Hamama. With two of the tourney's headliners being her own granddaughters, Makayla and Naomi. Makayla has a stain like KC's, but Naomi doesn't. She has no powers at all. She's stainless. But that's not stopping her from taking to the stage as a new celebrity athlete, no matter what's in her way. Including Makayla.

TL;DR, Two sisters hate each other and they're competing to become sport stars.

A stupider TL;DR, it's DBZ with lesbians.

So yeah, that's my manga. It's been on hiatus since June (I've been building up a monstrous backlog and it will be back next year). Here's some pages out of context and a link, go read it.

And a majority of the backlog is a project I've been working on called HAMAMA RISING. What is it? You'll see. You'll see soon.

Your product beautifully embodies the “less is more” philosophy. Can you describe your product design mentality?  

We started by talking to a lot of people - friends and family, strangers, everyone, and compiling a list of requirements for a product for growing food at home.  We found that potential customers wanted a product that:

1) grows a good amount of food for the space required

2) doesn’t have to be watered repeatedly

3) is accessible in terms of cost and ease of use

We thought many of these requirements were contradictory (automatically watering and cheap, bountiful without taking up space), so we started with pretty complex prototypes thinking the solution needed to be complex.  But we soon realized we had to start much simpler and imagine every step in the growing process and think “how can this be simplified?”  

What has been the hardest part of the process? Do you have any advice for young entrepreneurs, especially those in urban agriculture?

As many other farming/gardening product developers can probably relate: the hardest part is waiting for plants to grow!  Despite our experimentation cycle being relatively short, waiting 10 days to see what works or doesn’t really puts a damper on “rapid prototyping.”

We embrace our iteration cycle now, however, because it has been in those moments of calm and waiting that we’ve been able to really watch the plants, appreciate their hard work, and design mechanisms that work with the plants to get them what they need - like the way the seedlings create their own humidity dome by pushing against the Seed Quilt cover!

So, our advice to young urban agriculture entrepreneurs would be: Complex problems don’t always require complex solutions. 

I love how “HAMAMA” rolls off the tongue! How did you come up with the name?

HAMAMA has a few meanings. It is the name of a beautiful waterfall in Hawaii, it means "dove" in Arabic, and it means "greenhouse" in Hebrew.  We felt that each of these meanings fit our company and product vision really nicely.  “HAMAMA” also has some personal meaning, since Camille mentored students at an educational greenhouse in Israel during her winter breaks while in school at MIT, and the greenhouse was colloquially referred to as "The HAMAMA." Actually, Agritecture previously did a post on her work there!

HAMAMA’s products are currently targeted towards home use. How do you imagine HAMAMA’s offerings will grow from there?

We’re targeting home use initially, but there are a lot of places we can see MicroGrow Kits and Seed Quilts being really valuable.  For one, we’d love to see it used in schools. These products are great for exposing students to gardening in a way that is low maintenance and mess-free for teachers, but still engaging and informative for students.   

Really though, we have much bigger dreams for Seed Quilts. We actually invented Seed Quilts to build an edible living wall of microgreens, where the Seed Quilt would act like a harvestable wallpaper.  What we ended up making is a living textile that can grow on any surface, in any color, at any angle!  That means Seed Quilts can be used to create living walls and other agritecture concepts that breathe life into a space - as well as fun, wacky creations like living toys, art, and clothing.  

What’s next for you?

We are engaging with our customers to keep improving our products and investigating interesting new Seed Quilt flavors.  We also just launched a subscription model where customers can choose to receive monthly deliveries of Seed Quilts so they never run out of homegrown microgreens!

We’ll keep exploring fun, new uses of Seed Quilts.  Our latest project was an art exhibition in the Bay Area called "Wallflowers," where we mounted large canvases of living microgreens Seed Quilts on the walls of the Oakland Coin-Op Laundromat to engage visitors in a new experience of what urban agritecture could look like in the future. The exhibition was in collaboration with Florae.co, who installed one of their Green Cubes filled with fragrant wildflowers as a living centerpiece to the exhibition.  Proceeds of the event were donated to Planting Justice, a nonprofit in Oakland dedicated to addressing inequalities in the food system.

We're also really looking forward to attending Aglanta in February. We can’t wait to hear Stephen Ritz’s keynote, exhibit HAMAMA products, and participate in workshops!