The Lab Challenges Culture-Shaping Brands To Grow A More Conscious Future

There’s something oddly radical about growing a plant upside down. It disrupts what we think we know about growth, and asks us to trust that potential isn’t fixed. That spirit is at the heart of CANGRO and Chaeli’s Upside-Down Tomato. This year, The Lab is joining the movement and expanding its mission of care into the gardens, classrooms, and inner worlds of children across South Africa.

In a video shared this week, The Lab’s Founder Jo Farah publicly challenged Adidas, Sportscene, FOM, and New Balance to participate in the initiative. “This isn’t a competition between brands,” he says. “It’s a collective opportunity to invest in the next generation. Our industry influences culture. It’s time we use that influence to spark real change.”

A Challenge That Feels Like Childhood Should

Chaeli’s Upside-Down Tomato sees learners receive a young tomato plant housed in a recycled container (often a repurposed paint tin), its roots held in soil while its stem threads down through a small opening. The plant grows toward the light, defying gravity.

The challenge turns classrooms into micro-gardens of possibility. Sleeves roll up. Soil gets under nails. Questions unfold. Why upside down? Will it survive? What happens if I miss a watering? And slowly, something begins to shift. The project becomes a living curriculum and a life lesson about community, care, and patience.

“This initiative is everything we believe in made tangible,” says Farah, “Children deserve to feel what real agency feels like; to hold a container that once was waste, grow something from it, and realise that sustainability isn’t abstract. It’s alive. It’s theirs. And they can shape it.”

Where The Lab Meets the Garden

For The Lab, a company redefining care through biotechnology and social responsibility, this initiative feels like a continuation of its philosophy. The brand’s ethos speaks to a worldview centred on the belief that how we tend to the things we love shapes how we tend to the world itself.

In a sense, upside-down tomatoes and biotechnology-driven fashion care share a common thread. Both challenge old habits. Both honour the value of longevity. Both ask, “What if care is the most transformative tool we have?”

What started out as a crazy idea 13 years ago has become a challenge welcoming learners and corporate partners across the country. For many learners, it may be their first time growing anything. For others, it becomes the first time they feel they can teach something to siblings, parents, or peers. The harvest is symbolic but its impact is real.

This year, The Lab’s involvement aims to open even more doors. By calling on other culture-shaping brands to join, The Lab is reframing sustainability education as a shared responsibility. Corporate partners who step into the challenge help widen access for disadvantaged and disabled learners, ensuring the initiative remains inclusive. Because the hands that learn to nurture a recycled paint tin into a thriving plant are the same hands that will one day shape a more conscious future. And that is the future The Lab believes in.

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Mzansi Pulse

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The Lab Challenges Culture-Shaping Brands to Grow a More Conscious Future

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