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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Ag Tech

Demetria Raises $3M to Automate Coffee Bean Analysis

Demetria, a startup that promises to automate the analysis and grading of coffee beans, came out of stealth yesterday and announced that it has raised $3 million in seed funding. The round was led by Celeritas and a group of private investors including Mercantil Colpatria, the investment arm of Grupo Colpatria.

As coffee beans move through the supply chain, their quality has traditionally been judged by “cupping.” In this process, a human with proper certifications selects samples of beans and judges them based on factors like aroma, acidity and flavor. As you can imagine, this process is slow, wasteful, and because it’s done by experts, not globally available.

It also means that coffee bean quality and pricing is a subjective process, which can incorporate any number of human biases that can affect the prices paid to farmers and across the supply chain.

Demetria aims to automate this process by using near-infrared scanning and cloud-based artificial intelligence analysis to develop “digital fingerprints” of coffee beans. As green coffee beans move through the supply chain, they are analyzed with a near-infrared scanner to look for biochemical markers to match a bean’s profile with an industry standard set of quality metrics.

This means that bean quality can be quickly assessed with a handheld scanner and mobile phone. What’s more, beans do not have to be taken out of the supply chain to tested via cupping. Instead, they stay, reducing waste.

We’ve seen this type of AI-based scanning in the food supply chain elsewhere. Most recently, Driscoll’s announced that it was using Consumer Physics’ SCiO technology to scan berries for sweetness. Consumer Physics’ handheld scanner is one of the tools being used by Demetria.

Other companies in the space include AgShift and Intello Labs, both of which use computer vision and AI to assess food quality and bring objective grading to buyers and sellers.

In its press announcement yesterday, Demetria said it has successfully completed a pilot with Carcafe, the Colombian coffee division of agricultural commodity traders Volcafe/ED&F Man. Demetria said it is also working with Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (FNC), the Colombian National Federation for Coffee Growers, to develop apps that help farmers and their transaction points in the supply chain control and track bean quality, and price.

Technologies like Demetria’s can hopefully bring more fairness to the food supply chain by speeding up the process and standardizing the analysis so everyone gets paid a fair price.

Gotham Greens Heads West, Partners With University of California-Davis to Grow Better Greens

NYC-based Gotham Greens today announced its plans to expand its controlled ag operations to the West Coast with a 10-acre greenhouse in Solano County, California. The forthcoming facility will be located near the University of California-Davis, with whom Gotham will collaborate on future greenhouse research and innovation. 

Gotham, which currently operates greenhouses in New York, Illinois, Colorado, Rhode Island, and Maryland, raised $87 million at the end of 2020, part of which the company said would go towards expansion.

The California greenhouse is expected to open in 2021 and, like other Gotham facilities, will grow leafy greens that will then be sold to retailers and foodservice businesses. Having a facility on the West Coast will increase the number of potential customer for Gotham, which supplies its greens to local markets rather than shipping them across the country. Not including the California facility, Gotham’s farms serve about 40 states. Within those, the company has partnerships with Albertsons, Whole Foods, Target, and other major grocery retailers, as well as e-commerce deals with AmazonFresh, FreshDirect, and Peapod.

Gotham also uses a good deal of tech to control the various growing environments of its greenhouses (light, temperature, humidity), and to automate certain repetitive tasks. The partnership with UC Davis is partially meant to advance research and development in this area. “The new greenhouse facility enables opportunities for Gotham Greens and the University of California system to collaborate on research and innovation focused on advancing the science, workforce, technology and profitability of indoor agriculture globally,” Gotham said in a statement.

The company’s expansion comes at a time when tech-powered greenhouses are increasing in both size and numbers. Earlier this year, AppHarvest went public and Little Leaf Farms raised $90 million to expand its number of greenhouse. Revol Greens did the same in September of 2020 with a $68 million fundraise. Not all of these greenhouse operations share territory yet, but at the rate of these expansions, they may well do so in the near future.

Gotham Greens has raised a total of $130 million to date. 

Kalera Acquires Vindara to Optimize Seed Breeding for Indoor Vertical Farming

Vertical farming company Kalera announced this week it has acquired Vindara, a company developing seeds specifically for the indoor vertical farming environment and other controlled environment agriculture methods. With this acquisition, Kalera says it can increase both crop yield and the speed of growth cycles in its current and future facilities.

Kalera currently has two commercial-scale vertical farms in operation, both in Orlando, Florida. The company is also expanding rapidly, with new locations across the U.S. in the works. Facilities in Atlanta, Denver, and Houston are slated to open in 2021.

Typically, seeds for outdoor farming are bred to resist things like disease and pests. The drawback of that method is that plant flavor, texture, and nutritional profile is often sacrificed in the process. But in a fully controlled indoor grow environment like a vertical farm, pests are nonexistent and growers and systems have better control over monitoring the danger of plant diseases. 

That gives companies like Vindara an opportunity to produce seeds bred for flavor, color, nutritional content, and better overall quality. The company combines genomics, machine learning and computational biology with traditional breeding techniques to get its seeds, which are non-GMO and which Vindara says take 12 to 18 months to develop, rather than the standard five to seven years.

With the acquisition, Vindara will become a “fully owned subsidiary” of Kalera and operate out of the latter’s headquarters in Orlando. For Kalera, the acquisition brings the potential to develop its own plant varieties and increase the output of existing ones. Right now those are just leafy greens, though Kalera hinted at spinach and strawberries for the future. 

AgFunder: Record-breaking $31B Invested in Agrifood Tech in 2020

Ag tech VC firm, AgFunder, released its annual report on agrifood tech funding today. Companies in this sector raised $26 billion in 2020, a 15.5 percent increase over 2019. If that wasn’t enough, AgFunder actually expects that already record-breaking figure to bump up to $30.5 billion as more deals done in 2020 are revealed.

The AgFunder 2021 Agrifoodtech Investing Report breaks the agrifood tech sector into “upstream” companies, which are closer to the farm, and “downstream” companies, which are closer to the consumer. AgFunder said that for the first time on record, upstream companies outraised downstream companies in 2020. Those upstream companies pulled in $15.8 billion across 1,950 deals, while downstream companies raising $14.3 billion across 1,142 deals.

AgFunder also found that alt-protein/novel ingredient/functional food companies raised $2.3 billion across 26 deals, and that e-grocery was the most funded downstream category, raising $5.1 billion across 119 deals. AgFunder noted that the agrifood tech sector is maturing, with startups at both growth and late stage raising larger deals than ever before.

“This is no longer seen as a niche, experimental and risky sector, highlighted by the increase in the median size of growth stage and late stages deals,” Louisa Burwood-Taylor, head of media & research at AgFunder, said in today’s press announcement. “Investors piled in despite Covid; the first wave of innovators in each category are now mature and able to raise huge rounds with many household names such as Impossible Foods; and the second wave of innovators is now raising much larger rounds than the first wave did at the same stage.”

What’s interesting about that statement is that AgFunder positions this growth in agrifoodtech as being in spite of the pandemic. While the pandemic has inflicted enormous economic difficulties around the world, it also seems like there was increased investment because of the pandemic. Downstream technologies in particular benefited as restaurants and grocers all accelerated adoption of systems that reduced human-to-human interaction and helped meet the rising demand for e-commerce to get our food.

AgFunder’s report reinforces earlier data showing the increased investment in food tech in 2020. Pitchbook said that a little more than $12 billion was invested in food tech companies last year. There is probably some definitional and scope differences between the two reports, but the broader point stands. Food tech companies raised a ton of money last year, and with the pandemic still very much a part of our lives, the breakneck pace of investment will continue in 2021.

InFarm to Launch a Network of Commercial-Scale ‘Modular’ Indoor Farms

InFarm, a company best known for bringing modular hydroponic farming units to grocery stores, today introduced its Growing Center facility, a combination high-capacity farm and distribution center. The company plans to build out 100 of these facilities by 2025 in major cities all over the world, with the total amounting to 1.5 million square meters of farmland, according to a company press release.

Berlin, Germany-based InFarm already operates a network of smaller, cloud-connected hydroponic farms across the world. These modular units are typically found in the produce section of major grocery retailers, from Marks & Spencer in the UK to Kroger in the U.S. to Aldi in Germany. The pod-like farms are modular, meaning they can vary in size depending on location. And because the leafy greens inside the farms are grown on-site, the buying public gets access to more freshly harvested produce that hasn’t traveled the length of a country to reach store shelves.

With its Growing Center initiative, InFarm is essentially scaling up the modular-farm concept. Dozens of InFarm’s modular units, each between 10 and 18 meters (about 33 to 59 feet) high, make up one Growing Center. InFarm says these facilities take six weeks to build and will be able to generate “the crop-equivalent of 10,000 m2 of farmland.”

InFarm’s existing units in grocery stores are all cloud controlled, so that environmental elements like CO2 levels, farm temperature, light and pH levels, and plant growth cycles can be set, monitored, and managed remotely across the entire network. In other words, if one combination of those elements works for, say, basil, that “recipe” can be replicated across the entire network.

Growing Centers will plug into this network, so that the entirety of InFarm’s units are connected to “a central farming brain,” according to the company’s Chief Technology Officer Guy Galonska. “We’ve collected more than 300 billion data points throughout our farming network to date. These data enable us to perfect our growing recipes and improve yield, quality and nutritional value, while reducing the production price constantly,” he said in today’s press release.

While plenty of smaller vertical farms exist nowadays, much of the attention of late has been on larger, commercial-scale facilities that produce pounds of leafy greens that number in the millions. Last year, AeroFarms, Kalera, Plenty, BrightFarms, Nordic Harvest, and many others saw both major funding and significant expansion. Driving a lot of this activity is that commercial-scale farms can produce more delicate types of produce (e.g., leafy greens) closer to consumers, eliminating the need for lengthy shipping times that can damage plants.

All of these companies promise produce grown more efficiently, with less water and energy required than would be with traditional farming. However, at this point, most data is siloed within each company, so it’s difficult to find a truly universal, objective point of view when it comes to efficiency and energy savings. That doesn’t however, mean the numbers are all a smokescreen. In fact, of all the things the controlled ag sector did in 2020, proving itself as an important and viable part of the future farming system was the most important. While the role of this method will constantly evolve, its presence will remain a given for the foreseeable future.

For its part, Infarm says its Growing Centers will be located “in major urban centers.” So far, 15 are either planned or under construction across, London, Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Vancouver, Seattle, and Toronto. InFarm has not said which of these facilities will open first.

Future Acres Kicks Off $3M Equity Crowdfunding Campaign for its Ag Robotics Platform

Future Acres, a new startup developing a robotic platform for farms, announced today that it has launched an equity crowdfunding campaign that aims to raise $3 million.

The first product that Future Acres is building is Carry, a self-driving robot meant to, as the name suggests, carry crops around a farm. Carry uses GPS, computer vision and machine learning to autonomously navigate a farm (it can also be tele-operated), and can lug 500 lbs. of crops across all types of terrain and inclement weather. The electric robot has a 7 -- 10 hour battery life and can travel 6 -- 10 miles on a full charge.

Introducing Future Acres

If this sounds familiar, that’s because Carry is similar to Augean Robotics’ Burro, which also autonomously hauls up to 500 lbs of food and gear around the farm.

Future Acres is also looking beyond the simple act of carrying things and towards developing a true autonomous platform that can be used to perform other tasks around the farm like precision spraying, disease detection and, eventually, crop picking.

Farms in the U.S. face labor shortages caused by factors such as COVID restricting the movement of migrant labor and a patchwork of differing state and federal labor laws. Even if a farm is able to secure all of the workers it needs, that work is still hard and done under harsh conditions like extreme heat.

This is where farm automation can help. By automating some of the less skilled work involved with harvesting, such as carrying bushels around, human workers can focus on more delicate tasks such as picking, or coordinating logistical processes.

Right now, Future Acres has one prototype currently being tested. With the new funding it raises, the company will focus on developing the next version of Carry. Future Acres CEO, Suma Reddy, told me by phone last week that the company will work with farms to figure out what business model(s) work best, but right now, the Carry system costs between $800 and $1,200 a month for the hardware and software.

Little Leaf Farms Raises $90M to Grow Its Greenhouse Network

Massachusetts-based Little Leaf Farms has raised $90 million in a debt and equity financing round to expand its network of hydroponic greenhouses on the East Coast. The round was led by Equilibrium Capital as well as founding investors Bill Helman and Pilot House Associates. Bank of America also participated.

Little Leaf Farms says the capital is “earmarked” to build new greenhouse sites along the East Coast, where its lettuce is currently available in about 2,500 stores. 

The company already operates one 10-acre greenhouse in Devins, Massachusetts. Its facility grows leafy greens using hydroponics and a mixture of sunlight supplemented by LED-powered grow lights. Rainwater captured from the facility’s roof provides most of the water used on the farm. 

According to a press release, Little Leaf Farms has doubled its retail sales to $38 million since 2019. And last year, the company bought 180 acres of land in Pennsylvania on which to build an additional facility. Still another greenhouse, slated for North Carolina, will serve the Southeast region of the U.S. 

Little Leaf Farms joins the likes of Revol Greens, Gotham Greens, AppHarvest, and others in bringing local(ish) greens to a greater percentage of the population. These facilities generally pack and ship their greens on the day of or day after harvesting, and only supply retailers within a certain radius. Little Leaf Farms, for example, currently servers only parts of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. 

The list of regions the company serves will no doubt lengthen as the company builds up its greenhouse network in the coming months. 

Revol Greens Launches Its Own Plant-Based Nutrient Source for Greenhouses

Greenhouse lettuce grower Revol Greens today unveiled a proprietary plant-based nutrient source with which it can feed the plants in its indoor farms. Dubbed Plant Fed, the product is currently patent pending, and its existence on Revol’s farms means leafy greens will be fed entirely by plants and not with animal ingredients, as is often the case with fertilizer.

Revol raised a $68 million funding round in September 2020 to build out its network of greenhouses. Currently, the company operates a 10-acre greenhouse in its hometown of Owatonna, Minnesota. Two more facilities, one in California and one in Texas, are slated to open in 2021.

The Revol process relies on as much automation as possible, though not necessarily of the robotics variety. Machines automatically sow the seeds in grow trays, which are then moved from the germination room to the greenhouse via a water flume and placed in a massive pools of water with their roots exposed. Human hands pick up the trays to move them from sowing machine to flume then out of the water pools, but people never touch the actual plants.

Meanwhile, much of the farm’s water source comes from UV-sterilized rainwater and snowmelt collected from the roof of the facility. This is an improvement over traditional farming, where produce often shares a water source with nearby animals, thus upping the risk of contamination to the plants. 

Like other hydroponic-based operations, Revol’s method grows plants without any soil. Instead, the new Plant Fed nutrient source will be pumped into the water that is circulated into the pools in which plant roots are exposed.

“The plant-based natural fertilizer developed by our research and development team is an extension of our goal to provide the healthiest, most natural leafy greens to our customers,” Revol’s CEO Mark Schulze said in today’s press release. 

Revol is certainly not alone in that goal, with recent activity in the high-tech greenhouse space underscoring the sector’s possibilities when it comes to future farming. Gotham Greens raised $87 million for its own greenhouse network at the end of 2020, and of course there was the news of AppHarvest going public earlier this year. 

Revol’s Plant Fed nutrient is only feeding the greens in the company’s own facility for now. Whether the company ever decides to sell its product to other controlled ag operations remains to be seen.

Bowery’s Founder, Irving Fain, on the Future of Vertical Farming

At one point in the not-so-distant past, vertical farming’s role in our future agricultural system was far from certain. Growing leafy greens in warehouse-like environments controlled by tech seemed like a compelling business, but one that had yet to prove itself either economically or as an important source of food for a growing world population.

That, at least, was a common sentiment Irving Fain, CEO and founder of Bowery, met with when he started his vertical farming company five years ago. “There was a bit of skepticism around it,” he told me over a call recently, suggesting that five years ago, there were a lot more “ifs” than “whens” in terms of vertical farming’s future.

Fain, Bowery, and the entire vertical farming industry get a much warmer reception nowadays. Investment dollars are pouring into the space. Around the world, companies, scientists, and food producers are using the method to not just supply upscale grocery stores with greens but experiment with breeds of produce, feed underserved populations, and grow food in non-arable regions. As Fain suggested when we spoke, the last 12 months seem to have turned those “ifs” into definite “whens.” 

Bowery’s last 12 months also illustrate this change. Fain said that Bowery went from under 100 retail locations about a year ago to nearly 700 right now, and will be in more than 1,000 “in the coming months.” Its produce is in a number of food retailers around the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, including Whole Foods Market, Giant Food, Stop & Shop, Walmart, and Weis Markets. And in 2020, the company experienced “more than 4x growth” with e-commerce partners.

While the pandemic is responsible for some of this popularity, Fain insists it is not the only reason for the eventful year. “It’s definitely bigger than the pandemic,” he said. “What you’re seeing is a food system that’s evolving and [people have a desire] to see transparency and traceability in the food system.” These, he says, are issues the traditional food supply chain isn’t really able to address right now, hence the opportunity for companies like Bowery, which effectively cut multiple steps out of the supply chain.

Bowery grows its greens (lettuces, herbs, and some custom blends) inside industrial spaces where crops are stacked vertically in trays and fed nutrients and water via a hydroponic system. Technology controls all elements of the farm, from the temperature inside to how much light each plants get. The company currently operates two farms, one in New Jersey and the other in Maryland. A third is planned for Pennsylvania.

Technology, in particular, is something Bowery has big plans for. On top of a retail expansion, Bowery also added some notable personnel to its staff, including Injong Rhee, formerly the Internet of Things VP at Google as well a chief technologist at Samsung. Having such technology chops onboard will be vital in order for Bowery to realize many of its ambitions around advanced automation, which has the potential to optimize many parts of the seed-to-store process for vertically grown greens. 

For example, Bowery’s farms are equipped with sensors and cameras that are constantly collecting data — “billions” of points, according to the company — that can be used to not just observe the current state of plant health but also predict the most optimal growing conditions for each crop. Elements like temperature, humidity levels, nutrient levels, and light intensity can all be adjusted, via the BoweryOS software, to create those optimal conditions. The end result is more consistent crop production, better yields, more flavorful food, and, ideally, a better nutritional profile for the greens compared to what conventional produce offers.

The system can also, through automation and AI, detect problems with plants. In a recent interview with Venture Beat, Bowery Chief Science Officer Henry Sztul used the example of butterhead lettuce yellowing at the edges during growth. Bowery’s system is technologically advanced enough at this point that it is starting to understand the conditions that create those yellowing edges. That foreknowledge, in turn, will allow growers to adjust the crop “recipe” (see above mixture of lights, temperature, etc.) to avoid the problem.

It took Bowery years to get to this point in terms of what its technology is capable of doing. “The system [for] indoor farming that you choose has a direct impact on the crops you’ll be able to grow, on the margins you’ll be able to generate, and on the return profile of the business itself,” said Fain. “And so being incredibly intentional and thoughtful about what technology you use is something we spent a lot of time on because it has an extraordinarily important economic impact.”

On a less technically complex note, controlled ag from Bowery and others also goes some way towards reinventing the supply food chain. Rather than greens being harvested in, say, Mexico and shipped via a complex distribution process all the way to Baltimore, they are packaged up at the farm and distributed to nearby retailers, usually those within a day’s drive “It is much more sustainable. It is much more efficient, and it’s more reliable, and those things have been important to consumers long before COVID,” said Fain.

Bowery will continue to innovate on both the technology and supply side of its business, as well as with the food itself. The company just launched a new specialty product line that will experiment with different flavors of greens and change frequently.

In terms of tech, Bowery’s latest farm, currently being built in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, will incorporate even more automation than the company’s two existing farms. That location is slated to open later in 2021. When it does, Bowery will be capable of serving nearly 50 million people within a 200-mile radius.

The company hopes to expand its geographic reach much wider some day, building farms near most major U.S. cities and beyond. Given the increased confidence in the vertical farming sector as a whole, now looks to be the optimal time to move towards those ambitions. 

Zayndu Uses Plasma for Seed Sterilization and Crop Loss Prevention

Electricity may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you want to sterilize something, but that is exactly the tool UK-based startup Zayndu is using on seeds. As AgFunder reports, Zayndu uses plasma to ensure that seeds don’t carry disease or fungi with them when planted in the ground.

Afflicted seeds may not germinate as well, or worse, bring infection into the soil and damage future crops. Sterilizing seeds before planting helps mitigate these issues.

Based on decades of research from Loughborough University, the early stage Zayndu’s technology works by placing seeds in a rotating drum and then running an electric current through the air inside the chamber. As Ralph Weir, CEO of Zayndu explained to AgFunder, this electric current creates plasma, which is a combination of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species [RONS]. These RONS are disinfectants, which destroy bacteria, fungi and viruses without damaging the seeds themselves. When the chamber is open, all that is left are sterile seeds and fresh air.

According to Weir, Zayndu’s plasma technology sterilizes seeds better than existing chemical treatments do. Chemicals have can have a negative environmental impact and are increasingly expensive. Additionally, chemicals don’t work on every seed disease.

Zayndu is actually the second startup we’ve covered using plasma to prevent food loss. Clean Crop Technologies uses High Voltage Atmospheric Cold Plasma to zap food post harvest to remove toxins, molds and pests, and extend the shelf-life of perishables.

If the promise of these technologies bear out, and are able to scale, we could be seeing more plasma-related startups and technologies applied to our meal journey in the not-too distant future.

Gardyn Raises $10M for Its Consumer-Grade Indoor Farm System

Bethesda, Maryland-based indoor farming company Gardyn announced today it is raising a $10 million Series A round led by JAB Holding Company. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the non-controlling investment, when finalized, will bring Gardyn’s total funding to date to $15 million. 

The new funds will allow Gardyn to accelerate the North American expansion of its consumer-grade vertical farm to meet what the company calls “the incredible demand” it is currently seeing for its product.

Gardyn’s at-home vertical farming system is geared towards consumers interested in growing their own produce who have neither space nor green thumb to do it the traditional way. The farm itself is a compact vertical tower that can grow up to 30 plants at once and easily fits inside a small apartment. Its accompanying software platform, dubbed Kelby, automates the majority of the grow process, including circulating the water and nutrients, monitoring plant growth, and notifying users, via a smartphone app. when it’s time to add water to the console or harvest the plants.

Currently, the device can grow leafy greens, herbs, some flowers, cherry tomatoes, and jalapeños. Customers have the option to also use their own seeds.

Gardyn is one of several companies developing indoor farms for the consumer home, a category that grew significantly in 2020. Gardyn itself said it experienced “double-digit month-over-month growth throughout 2020.” Others, including AeroGrow and Click & Grow, also reported surges in interest over the last year. Aspara, too, reported a spike in sales in Hong Kong, where the company is based. Aspara has since launched in the U.S. market.

“I am absolutely convinced we are going to see in the coming two years a total disruption in the way we grow things,” Gardyn’s founder and CEO FX Rouxel told me late last year. More than ever, there is greater demand from consumers for local foods with traceable origins and sans pesticides. The pandemic ushered in record levels of consumers buying produce directly from farmers; putting a farm in your house is the obvious next step.

For some, that is. Food sovereignty in the home is currently only possible for those that can afford it. In other words, farming systems for the home are still fairly expensive, ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand depending on the company and model.

When we spoke, Rouxel was keenly aware of this point, and that the $799 price tag for Gardyn’s the base model is still too high for many. “We don’t want this to be only for well-off people,” he told me. “It’s important that we find ways that anyone can afford this.”

The hope is that some of this new funding and expansion can go towards making the grow-at-home movement possible for a wider swath of the population.

Fifth Season Expands the Grocery Footprint for Its Vertically Grown Greens

Fifth Season, a company using vertical farming and robotics to grow greens indoors, just announced a sizable expansion for its leafy green products in Giant Eagle Retail stores. As of today, Fifth Season greens will be available in over 75 Giant Eagle and Market District stores across Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio metro areas. 

The expansion is a significant jump from the company’s previous distribution reach, which was just 10 stores in the Pittsburgh area. The company also launched a direct-to-consumer service for Pittsburgh-area residents in 2020.

Like other controlled ag companies, Fifth Season grows greens vertically indoors, aiding the process with hydroponics and technology (sensors, AI, etc.). Its main differentiator at the moment is the robotics element of its grow process. A proprietary robotics system handles tasks on the farm such as stacking and moving trays of plants, harvesting, and packaging. While the system is overseen by a human, actual bodies are less needed in the grow room of Fifth Season’s farm, which cuts down on labor costs and can execute tasks faster. Human-free grow rooms also mean there is less chance of pathogens getting into the growing space and impacting plants’ health.

The use of robotics isn’t yet widespread in vertical farming, although that is changing quickly, with companies like Nordic Harvest and iFarm introducing a range of robotics and automation technologies to their operations. Kalera, which is expanding rapidly across the U.S., is another notable example.

For Fifth Season, today’s news marks the company’s first expansion outside of its hometown of Pittsburgh. The company will sell four different varieties of its greens as well as ready-to-eat salads at the new retail locations.

The company said in today’s press release that it is the first of many expansions Fifth Season will announce in 2021.