Innocentia Duru didn’t come to food systems through agriculture or economics. She came through art.

As a mixed media and sculpture artist, she spent years exploring how discarded materials could be remade and given new life; including experimenting with sawdust as a medium for relief sculpture. The instinct to find value in sawdust from wood waste, found objects, or materials others overlook became the foundation of everything she would build next.

This instinct showed up in her kitchen too. Innocentia had been composting her kitchen waste as organic manure for her backyard farm long before YardGro existed — turning food scraps into soil input that fed her next harvest. What struck her most was how simple and natural the cycle felt once you understood it. The process raised a question: what if this cycle could extend beyond one backyard to an entire estate, a restaurant, a city?

In 2024, food insecurity and inflation across Nigeria made that question urgent. Around the same time, she got a group of friends together to pool funds, buy food in bulk, and split it among themselves. It was cheaper, fresher, and it felt like something worth building on.

Those two ideas — the closed loop of recycling food waste, and the quiet power of collective buying — became YardGro.