For Filip, being an entrepreneur is nothing new. “I sold my first pens to my dad when I was five. I got a lot of encouragement from my parents when doing my own stuff. They were both entrepreneurs themselves”, he says. “I get a kick out of creating new stuff, new hacks and new ideas to see if they will work”. “So now when Sopköket is doing so well I get a huge kick out of inspiring others and to see how they in turn find the courage to do what I did.”

Four years back, summer of 2015, Filip was back in Sweden after a journey to India and Costa Rica. At the time, Stockholm had a Food Truck boom and Fillip wanted a “hipster food truck” of his own, making the kind of food he had learnt from living with a Costa Rican family – fermented food like Kimchi, Kefir and Kombucha. Unfortunately, another truck, ‘Mould’ did just that, and Filip had to let that idea go. But Filip wanted to combine his interest in food with his social engagement. He wanted to make a difference. “We were the first in Sweden and possibly in the world with serving school food made out of waste food. Things the food stores otherwise would throw away. But we didn’t stop with just food. We’ve widened the concept to include all sorts of product waste, from kitchen tools and clothes to the long term unemployed.” We run this as a company rather than an NGO because we don’t want to rely on benefits. I don’t think there’s a difference between doing good and running a business, so this is what we do differently: we run a company and take responsibility.”

One of Filip’s biggest inspirations is Petter Stordalen and his biography My Secret. “I see myself in him. That if you have an idea, it is up to you to execute it, sell it and spread it. Selling to me is finding people, understanding their needs and help them with a solution to these problems. It’s ’just do it’, not being afraid of spreading your idea though it doesn’t exist and creating an illusion that it exists. That’s how we’ve been working with Sopköket”. “My biggest challenge right now is discipline, something Stordalen talks a lot about. I’m terrible at that. I’m working on not procrastinating, and my big goal is to do things so that I have free time.”

Filip and Sopköket applied and was accepted into the three-month Fellowship program. “I met a lot of new friends from mingle nights at SSES, people I consider my closest friends. They all do very different stuff, but we all share the same passion. What I like the most with SSES is that it is a place of possibilities. It’s cosy, small, unpretentious and humble. The networking is one of the most important parts of being there.”

Filip’s advice when marketing an idea that doesn’t exist yet:

“We started out with our idea and an empty Facebook page. So we created a food event in Rålambovsparken and I asked a friend of mine who’s a photographer to take pictures of it, people standing in line and me handing out food and then posting the images on Facebook. And then we continued doing that, always making sure we had a photographer with us and posting the pictures. So don’t be afraid to pick up all contacts that you can get. If you lack knowledge in areas you need, make sure to learn it or to tie yourself to people who do.”

More: https://sopkoket.se/

Source: https://www.sses.se/stories/filip_lundin/