The Story Behind The Mills Fabrica, One Of Europe’s Most Innovative Start-Up Platforms
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2 days ago
The platform focuses on improving sustainability in the food and fashion industries
The Mills Fabrica in King’s Cross has become one of London’s coolest businesses and one of Europe’s most impressive hubs for start-ups, says Lisa Grainger.
Inside The Mills Fabrica, King’s Cross
Every now and then an organisation or an individual comes to our attention and instantly gives us hope. In 2025, that organisation for me has been The Mills Fabrica.
As its name suggests, the startup platform started out in the textile world, the brainchild of Vanessa Cheung, who is the granddaughter of the founder of Hong Kong’s textile-manufacturing Nan Fung Group. Having studied in the US and witnessed the re-use of old industrial buildings for innovative businesses, in 2018 Cheung persuaded her family to utilise their shuttered old factories. One they turned into an exhibition space; another into a shopping centre; and the third a home for The Mills Fabrica: an innovative platform that helps startup businesses in the textile and agri-food businesses. When the latter took off in 2018, the founder took on her first employee, Amy Tsang, and a year later they opened their first outpost in Britain, in King’s Cross.
What Berkshire-born Tsang has achieved from their converted multi-use warehouse is nothing short of astonishing. In just six years, The Mills Fabrica has become not only one of the city’s coolest businesses but one of Europe’s most innovative hubs for start-ups. Why they focus on clothes and food is pretty straightforward, Tsang explains from her shared workspace housing 12 employees alongside 130 co-workers from about 50 companies working in sustainability. ‘Both are integral in our daily lives,’ she says. ‘The minute you wake up, you think about what to eat and what to wear. And given collectively the apparel and food industries produce over 44 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, if we could reduce that, it could have a huge impact on our planet.’
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The way they work is to support early-stage start-ups through funding, mentoring, competitions and links to a powerful network they’ve brought together – of international funders, specialists, organisations, academics and retailers, who collectively can help to improve and speed up the process, and bring the innovations to market.
We’re not talking small players, either. At their most recent gathering, in February, to brainstorm future foods, they brought together bigwigs from HSBC and the World Bank, Associated British Foods and Waitrose, alongside inventive companies such as MicroHarvest and Better Dairy. Networking is key, she says firmly. ‘If we can connect people, that’s the best way to accelerate a global transition to a more sustainable future.’
In the UK, the AgriFoods businesses are really pretty innovative, Tsang tells me. Take Nukoko, which has started to make chocolate from UK grown fava beans. ‘We all love chocolate,’ she says, but instead of growing cocoa, ‘which is a direct cause of deforestation in some of the poorest parts of the world, Nukoko takes a local waste resource and turns it into chocolate powder.’ Or, she adds, The Supplant Company in Cambridge, which is up-cycling agricultural side-streams like wheat straws and corn husks and cobs, and turning them into alternative flours and sugars.
There is no specific type of business The Mills Fabrica supports, either. Some are in tech that helps save water or resources; some use plants to make proteins or fabrics; others make machinery that sorts second-hand clothes for recycling. Many, she says proudly, are already out in the market – such as Unspun, which uses 3D weaving machines ‘that can weave thousands of yarns into a single piece of clothing’, wasting nothing. ‘Already they have partnerships with Decathalon and Walmart to scale across Europe,’ she adds. ‘So they’re doing really well.’
Ultimately, she says, ‘we encourage everyone to work together. Innovations don’t work in silos. We have to work together to make a difference to the planet’.
Taste of Tomorrow, an exhibition about future foods, is at The Mills Fabrica until 31 July. themillsfabrica.com
