Nat recalls holidaying in Hua Hin as a child, and he remember being impressed by both the sea and the food. Nat believes he had a relatively ordinary childhood. His father worked with several different companies as sales director and his mother worked her way to a mid-level position at Bangkok Bank. Both parents modelled working hard to their children, who were all recipients of a university education, thanks in large part to their mother’s role in supporting their education. In the younger grades Nat now realises he must have been somewhat of a disappointment to his parents as he did not take to his studies with much enthusiasm. That was reserved only for activities outside the classroom. Nat was attracted to many sports, that being where he excelled. Teachers characterised the young boy as unreliable, while Nat admits he was always bored in class.

One characteristic that Nat inherited from his father was his love of animals. Nat professes to love all animals, yet when pressed will admit that reptiles don’t make the list.  Nat’s parents kept a menagerie of dogs in a compound behind their home before the children came along. Nat’s most cherished childhood memory is a bitter-sweet one of his first puppy, Sunny. Nat met Sunny at Chatuchak market in Bangkok while on a shopping trip with his father. Seeing that it was love at first sight for his son and the pup, his father allowed Nat to take the dog home and the pair became fast friends. However, the friendship lasted only a few months before Sunny died, the family theorising that Sunny had ingested something poisonous on the street. It was Nat’s first experience of loss and grief, however dogs still play an important role in Nat’s life. Pocky has been a loyal and much-loved companion for more than five years.

It wasn’t until Nat was in Grade 9 that he realised the importance of academics if he were to have a successful career and the financial rewards accompanying it. Upon graduation from secondary school, Nat enrolled in Assumption University in Bangkok, completing a four-year Honours Degree in Business Studies in just 3 ½ years and so attracting the attention of the Dean of the faculty who offered Nat a scholarship to complete his Masters of Science in International Business at South Bank University in London. Nat was initially attracted to the idea, but took his mother’s wise counsel and refused the offer, which would have required a six-year teaching trade-off, so limiting Nat’s career path. Instead, Nat’s mother committed to continue funding his studies in London, and the Masters was completed in just a year, all the while Nat working hard to perfect his command of the perplexing English language.

After stretching his wings in London for a year, Nat returned to Bangkok’s corporate jungle, where only the fittest and most dedicated survive. Nat was determined to make his parents proud of his career achievements. Yet, in retrospect, Nat feels that his greatest achievement has not been in the corporate world, but rather in the privacy of his own home. He is most thankful for his wife Sutida, whose intrinsic happiness is an example to all of how to live well. Nat has absolute admiration of how she is able to treat herself as well as she treats others. With Sutida’s full blessing, Nat was the primary care-giver for their two sons, Prin, now 21, and Pun, 17. Child-raising and nurturing came very naturally to Nat, for whom being a loving father has been an abiding passion. Indeed, given the ability to relive a portion of his life, Nat would choose the period around 2010 when his boys were little. Not with the aim of doing anything differently, but just to again experience the joy of seeing the world through their innocent eyes. It was the happiest time of Nat’s life.

Nat spent four years living and working in Malaysia from 2013 to 2017, three of them accompanied by his family. As General Manager of a company, Nat was working at turning around its profitability with all six department heads reporting directly to him. He was the first to arrive at the office in the morning and the last to leave at night, such was Nat’s commitment to his mission. What had been a strength became Nat’s weakness as his health suffered from the long, sedentary hours as he developed a back injury that has defied treatment over many years. Despite having consulted over 100 medical specialists and being open to a broad range of treatments, both in traditional and modern medicine, Nat is unable to say his muscular and inflammation issues are fully resolved. He still engages in regular yoga and calisthenics to strengthen his back, and takes full advantage of the fact that Hua Hin is the perfect place to indulge in outdoor activities such as trail running and biking. For a period of time, Nat was also a regular at Spartan training.

Nat relocated to Hua Hin at the end of 2024, and is living in the family’s second home, a property which has been in Sutida’s family for many years and used mainly for bi-annual holidays away from the busyness of Bangkok. This move has been one that Nat has made alone, with the rest of the family still residing in the nation’s capital. Sutida loves her job as the Marketing Director of a large office furniture company and has no plans to retire anytime soon. Prin and Pun are young men and are revelling in the buzz of Bangkok, so Nat is alone, having retired from full-time employment to focus on himself and find the balance which was sorely missing in his life. Although Nat is physically removed from his loved ones, technology allows them to remain in daily contact. Nat notes that their regular times together, principally when he travels to be with them in Bangkok, are usually “quality time” with everyone enjoying being present in each other’s company.

Nat has founded Truly Organic as a social initiative rather than a business and is happy that it is ticking along and growing, covering costs. With Truly Organic, making a profit is not a motive. Nat wants to bring organic produce to the local market at a price that it is comfortable paying. Nat cites organic produce sales practices in Michigan in the US as well as Japan and Germany, where a “farm to household” approach has all but removed wholesalers, and their large margins, from the supply chain, to the benefit of both farmers and consumers.  It is ironic that Nat’s biggest aim for Truly Organic is the time when his intervention is no-longer needed and a farmer-run collective delivers directly to households.

It would warm Nat’s heart if one day in the future, Thailand was also cited in the research papers as an exemplar of organic business practice. A local farmer in Pa-La-U once openly shared the reality behind false organic claims with Nat, who is keen to see improvement in proactive governance in the area so this could be realised. However, in the meanwhile, Nat can be justly proud of his efforts as founder of Truly Organic, where integrity is paramount. Local customers visit the website from Wednesday to Sunday to see what is available, in season, at the farms in Hua Hin and nearby provinces which are approved for the Truly Organic platform, having met its stringent certification and verification requirements. The fruit and vegetables are harvested, to order only, on a Monday and then transported to the Truly Organic distribution point, adjacent to Plik Vivek café in the T Rex precinct in Hin Lek Fai where they are packaged ready for collection. 

Khun Nui, owner of Plik Vivek and Nat’s partner in Truly Organic, shares Nat’s vision of affordable organic produce for all and a sustainable income for local farmers. Nui manages hub operations, logistics and the shop, allowing Nat to focus on farmer qualification, fieldwork and IT systems, ensuring there is science and evidence behind the approval of each farm. 

Nat is a compassionate man who wants the very best for everybody. He has well-developed listening skills and is frequently able to work out exactly what people need. Yet even then, Nat’s friends might still think he talks too much.

Nat learnt a lot about determination, perseverance and resilience from two businessmen he admires. One is Jack Ma, best known as a father of e-commerce with his company Alibaba. Ma failed and failed again before eventually graduating from university in 1988, only to be the single applicant of 24 who was rejected for employment with KFC China. In a classic move of not getting angry, but even, and eventually coming out on top, Ma’s Alibaba took a significant investor stake in Yum China which operates KFC, thereby exerting indirect partial ownership to rectify the slight. Nat’s first idol was actually Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple. Nat is quite tech-savvy and appreciates the convenience that technology has brought to the modern lifestyle while being concerned about the pressure it exerts on young people to be ever-responsive to others. Nat reminisced about his early days in the workforce when you could send a fax to head office, confident you wouldn’t need to deal with the response until the following day. The advent of social media has changed the world.

Nat now wishes that as a young man he had paid more attention to Buddhist scripture, since a mind more in tune with the words of Buddha might have saved him considerable anguish. Stress and pressure are on their way to becoming unfamiliar terms to Nat, whose sole defined future aim is to see Truly Organic become his legacy. In Hua Hin, Nat will continue to live up to his nickname of “Vegetable Man” with passion, perceiving and appreciating real value thanks to the many ideas, experiences, people and life lessons he has encountered along his personal trajectory.

Regular visitors to the Truly Organic platform will have noted that it has now expanded to include organic eggs, pork and chicken as well as seafood, caught sustainably, vacuum-sealed and traceable from boat to table. So perhaps “The Fresh Food Man” should be Nat’s new moniker?