Ana Tupou Pānuve
Business owner
Tonga
The delight of tropical gardening – both edible and ornamental – is what drives Ana Tupou Pānuve’s Tongan-based business, Bunny’s Backyard, as well as introducing the love of plants and planting to young children.
Ana Tupou Pānuve, also known as Pou, runs Bunny’s Backyard, a new business that has shot up like a vigorous young seedling within the last few years.
“What the company does is encapsulated in its name. Bunny’s Backyard is all to do with the things that we do in our backyard,” says Pānuve, “like what we plant in our backyard, what we can grow in our backyard, and what we do together with our family in the backyard. I’ve got a toddler daughter and her name is Wakana but I’ve always called her ‘Bunny’. We had this idea of planting things together at home during COVID. During that time, there was also a push by the government to roll out a food sustainability program and it kind of went from there. We were distributed seedlings from the Ministry of Agriculture and we thought we’d buy some other seeds as well and through trial and error see what worked.”
Now that the business is commercialised, Pānuve says, “Sometimes we can kind of get lost with it being a business and having to reach targets, make profit, and reach certain goals that are also required by us from our parent company. One of the ways that it’s evolved is that we’ve had to strike a balance where we are making a profitable business but still maintaining the initiative that we set out with, which was to always learn more about the things that we can do in our backyards together.”
Pānuve has introduced new initiatives like Plant and Earn, where children earn money for every seed sown and plant transplanted. “It’s only been a short time that we’ve been around, but we’ve done a number of things which I can say I’m really proud of like Plant and Earn.” She has also expanded the business to supply microgreens to restaurants.
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