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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Report: S2G Ventures Talks Alt-Protein, the Digitization of Grocery, and Other Areas of Food the Pandemic is Reshaping

“We continue to see the pandemic act as a catalyzing agent to accelerate trends that were in motion before it began. We believe that food and agriculture has undergone significant structural changes that will alter the course of the industry.” 

So says a new report from S2G Ventures, a VC firm based in Chicago, Illinois. The report, titled “The Ingredients for a Food System Revolution,” analyzes eight pandemics and outbreaks throughout history to pinpoint patterns around financial and economic recovery, innovation, and behavioral changes and norms. The analysis gives a clue as to how the current COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping norms, particularly when it comes to how we produce, get, and eat our food.

As an investment firm, S2G focuses mainly on the food and agriculture sectors, and counts AppHarvest, Shenandoah Growers, and Trace Genomics among its portfolio companies. It follows, then, that the new report is largely focused on how pandemics, epidemics, and outbreaks in the past have changed our food system and how the COVID-19 pandemic is continuing to do that at this very moment. “More decentralization [is] going to occur, more convergence of food and health, more decommodification as well,” Sanjeev Krishnan, S2G Ventures Managing Director and Chief Investment Officer, tells The Spoon.

As the report notes, “While there are many factors influencing the future of our food system, the study of past pandemic economic history is starkly consistent – an innovation cycle begins, and old habits and norms do shift.” 

A couple especially compelling areas where this is happening include alternative protein and online grocery.

As traditional meat-processing facilities face challenges and the unit economics for some types of alt-protein go down, we’re seeing more of the latter make its way into the mainstream. Krishnan explains we are moving more and more towards an “all of the above” view of protein. “I think there’s going to be animal protein, plant protein, and cell protein,” he says. Production of animal protein, in particular, will see “natural momentum around more niche, regional, decommoditized” products. Plant-based proteins, meanwhile, will see an increased focus on nutrition and affordability, while more countries will follow Singapore’s lead when it comes to cultivated meat. China is another important place to watch in this area, according to Krishnan.

S2G’s report also honed in on channel digitization, and specifically on the grocery sector. The report notes that a forced transition to online grocery during the pandemic “exponentially increased penetration from 24% to 49% between 2019 and 2020. Seniors became the fastest-growing segment of online shoppers on Instacart in 2020. In future, consumers will take “a hybrid approach” to groceries, and retailers will start to slightly differentiate what they sell online versus in the brick-and-mortar store.

The report also calls out controlled environment agriculture, a convergence of food and health, and food and agriculture digitization as other key areas to watch in terms of how the pandemic is reshaping the food system.  

“We can build a more resilient and hopeful food system that both addresses planet health and human health coming out of this,” says Krishnan. “Let’s use the pain and the agony and the anxiety that occurred as a call to action.

Small Robot Co. Raises Another £2M Through Equity Crowdfunding

Agtech startup Small Robot Company announced today that it has launched an equity crowdfunding campaign and already hit its goal of raising £2 million (~$2.77M USD). This is the fourth time Small Robot has turned to equity crowdfunding, where it has previously raised £4.3 million. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Small Robot to £9 million.

Small Robot Company uses a combination of robots and artificial intelligence to help automate certain agricultural needs. Small Robot’s products include the Tom, Dick and Harry robots. As we’ve covered previously:

  • Tom uses cameras and computer vision to precisely map a field of its plants and weeds
  • Wilma is the AI that analyzes those images to gather per-plant intelligence and weed identification
  • Dick is an autonomous weed zapper that is armed with an electric wand and information from Wilma to precisely electrocute individual weed without the need for chemicals
  • The company will eventually add a third robot, Harry, to its lineup that will do no-till drilling.

Equity crowdfunding has been a popular choice for robotics companies looking to raise money. Fellow agtech startup Future Acres, which makes a robotic platform that will initially be used to haul crops, launched its own crowdfunding campaign earlier this year. Other non-agtech robot startups equity crowdfunding include Piestro, Kiwibot, DaVinci Kitchen, Blendid and EBar.

Some of the benefits of equity crowdfunding include being able to raise money without the scaling pressures that come with traditional VC money, as well as building a diverse, enthusiastic community that can provide real world feedback and evangelize a product and campaign. For more, check out the video from a panel we devoted to equity crowdfunding at our recent ArticulATE food robotics conference in May (Spoon Plus subscription required).

UPDATE: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated Small Robot raised this funding through a private campaign plus a match with the U.K. Government. That particular money came through earlier financing. We regret the error.

AppHarvest Gets $91M in New Financing for Its High-Tech Indoor Farms

AppHarvest this week announced a $91 million financing arrangement with Equillibrium Capital, according to Food Navigator, who broke the news. The money will go towards AppHarvest’s previously stated goal of building out 12 high-tech indoor farming facilities by 2025.

Equilibrium Capital’s $91 million figure is a construction loan that will support the building of AppHarvest’s forthcoming 60-acre facility in Richmond, Kentucky. The Richmond location is almost identical to the company’s 60-acre high-tech greenhouse in Morehead, Kentucky, which is already operational and shipping different varieties of tomato to grocery retailers within a day’s drive. 

Three more farms in Kentucky are already under construction, too: two 15-acre facilities that will grow leafy greens in Berea and Morehead, respectively, and a 30-acre facility in Somerset for growing strawberries. 

The farms use or will use a mix of hydroponics, sensors, supplemental LED lighting, automation and AI as well as natural inputs like sunlight and rainwater to grow produce. AppHarvest is also adding more technology to its operations. It acquired harvesting robot startup Root AI in April of this year for $60 million, and CTO Josh Lessing (formerly the CEO of Root AI) has said AppHarvest is investing in robotics, artificial intelligence, teleoperation, and proprietary seed genetics. Its intelligent robot, Virgo, for example, is currently learning to manage crops and make decisions about growing decisions. All that tech, of course, means more data that has the potential to improve growing processes, crop yield, and food quality.

AppHarvest went public earlier this year via a SPAC merger with Novus Capital Corp for $475 million.

InFarm Plots a Major Retail Expansion Across Canada

InFarm is partnering with Sobeys, one of the largest food retailers in Canada, to sell its vertically grown greens in grocery stores across the country. The Berlin, Germany-based indoor agriculture company plans to be in an additional four of 10 Canadian provinces by 2023. The deal will place InFarm in over 1,000 retail locations across Canada.

InFarm’s original entry into Canada happened in March 2020, when the company brought its small, pod-like modular farms to Sobeys stores, Thrifty Foods, and Safeway Canada, all subsidiaries of the Empire Company. These smaller farms can be placed directly in the produce section of a grocery store or nearby, making it possible for retailers to harvest greens onsite and sell them directly to consumers faster.  

For InFarm, this most recently announced expansion also means constructing more of its InFarm Growing Centers, which the company says are “growth, production and distribution hubs” that also hold high-capacity vertical farms. The company first announced these centers at the beginning of 2021, saying it had 15 of them either planned or under construction across major urban centers.

Modularity is the underlying principle behind both the pod farms in produce sections and the larger Growing Centers. The size of these farms can change depending on where they are located. As InFarm CEO Erez Galonska told The Spoon earlier this month, this modularity allows the company to respond to demand faster in any given area since it takes less time to launch a smaller farm compared to some of the industrial-sized operations out there. “If you think of larger-scale farms, they require a lot of upfront investment and can take some time to set up,” he said. “We took a modular approach to help address this, reducing the amount of cash needed to start operations and speeding up the process.”

In today’s announcement, InFarm said that its new deal with Sobeys comes in response to demand, and that it will increase production volume in Canada by sevenfold. New Growing Centers are planned for Calgary, Halifax, and Winnipeg. A site in Hamilton, Ontario will eventually host InFarm’s largest Growing Center in North America.  

Over the next five years, InFarm plans to expand its selection of produce to include tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, mushrooms, salads and potted plants. The company plans to have 100 growing centers in operation by 2025.

InFarm Bets on Modular for the Future of CEA Growing

Much of the recent news (and investment dollars) in vertical farming has centered on massive, stationary plant factories that produce pounds of leafy greens in the millions. 

Bucking this norm — and possibly building a new one for indoor agriculture in the process — is a company called InFarm. Those that follow indoor ag developments closely will be familiar with the name, and may even have purchased greens at one of the stores where the company keeps its farms.

The Berlin, Germany-based company, founded in 2013, has long been known for its small, pod-like hydroponic farms it installs in grocery stores in restaurants. Greens can be harvested onsite — a major advantage when it comes to leafy greens, which are delicate and often get harmed during shipping and distribution. These mini-farms are currently in a few hundred locations around the world.

Earlier this year, the company also launched the first of a planned 15 InFarm Growing Center facilities. Each of these will produce the equivalent of 10,000 square meters of farmland, which is 1 hectare or about 2.47 acres in traditional farmland.  

Modularity is a key component of both concepts, as is the idea of a decentralized network of farms that share data with a main hub. Right now, the norm for vertical farming tends towards large, warehouse-sized farms that are stationary and can therefore only serve certain regions. Typically, companies like West Coast-based Plenty or AeroFarms in the Northeast and Kalera in the South distribute their greens to grocery retailers within a certain distance, usually no more than one day’s drive. If these companies want to expand to new markets, another lengthy construction must be planned and executed.

InFarm’s pods don’t go up overnight, but as CEO Erez Galonska explained to The Spoon recently, the company can respond more quickly to demand in any given area because of the pods’ modular design. For example, a farm might be built and operating within six weeks, versus eighteen months for a larger, less mobile build like those of other vertical farm companies.

Size-wise, InFarm’s units are anywhere between 30 and 100 feet tall. At maximum capacity, they can produce more than 500,000 plants per year. For now, crops are largely in the leafy greens space, though InFarm did recently say it is expanding its crop capabilities to mushrooms, tomatoes, and chilis. Galonska says the company has more than 75 products, and eventually wants “to fulfill our ultimate goal of offering the whole vegetable and fruit baskets.”

Leafy greens require fewer inputs (water, energy) than other vegetables to grow, which is one of the reasons they’re such a popular crop. And as was recently explained by World Wildlife Fund, energy consumption is still a major hurdle (among others) for indoor farming, and one reason the sector hasn’t moved far beyond leafy greens.

Collecting more data on plant growth and optimal growing conditions could help companies like InFarm eventually lower costs. It’s one of the reasons we see more and more indoor farming companies now talk about their “network,” where all farms are connected to the same network and feed data on plant growth back to the main system. InFarm’s units connect to the company’s HQ via the cloud and generate billions of data points that inform InFarm research and production. 

“The most important factor is the quantity and quality of the data that we are able to collect and generate insights from,” says Galonska. “Embedded in each and every one of our farms are more than 75 lab-grade sensors. Using hyperspectral cameras and scanning lasers, we track growth speed, photosynthesis activity and stress responses of our crops, giving real time biofeed back to how our plants are doing.”

He adds that his company has seen an 82 percent reduction in unit costs since 2018 and a 240 percent improvement in yield. The challenge, of course, will be continuing to get those gains as the company widens its crop varieties outside of the leafy green realm.

Galonska agrees that vertical farming is still a fairly capital-intensive business, which is another reason InFarm has chosen a de-centralized network for its business. “If you think of larger-scale farms, they require a lot of upfront investment and can take some time to set up,” he says. “We took a modular approach to help address this, reducing the amount of cash needed to start operations and speeding up the process.”

Rise Gardens Raises $9M in Series A Funding

Rise Gardens has raised $9 million in an oversubscribed Series A Round, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. The round was led by TELUS Ventures with participation from existing investors True Ventures and Amazon Alexa Fund and new investor Listen Ventures. It brings Rise’s total funding to date to $13 million. 

New funds will go towards product development and expansion, according to the company. As of right now, Rise Gardens makes an IoT-connected hydroponic grow system for the consumer home. The company provides the farming system, seed pods, nutrients for the water, and accompanying mobile app that users can rely on to monitor and manage plant growth. The garden comes in three sizes, plus a tabletop version that was released at the end of last year. 

As of right now, there are no voice control features on the gardens. But Rise CEO Hank Adams hinted last year at an eventual collaboration with Amazon that would bring Alexa functionality to the system. The Amazon Alexa Fund’s involvement in today’s funding round suggests that ambition is still very much in the plans. Rise will also in the near future sell its gardens via Amazon, marking the first time the product will be available via something other than the company’s direct-to-consumer channel.

Rise is one of a number of companies trying to bring the concept of high-tech gardening into consumers’ homes. Other notables right now include Gardyn, which makes a compact indoor-only unit, Lettuce Grow’s Farmstand, which can work both indoors and outdoors, and Hong Kong-based Aspara’s countertop unit.

All of these systems use hydroponics to grow leafy greens and herbs. They also all, at this point, come with a hefty price tag: Rise’s Single-Family Garden starts at $549 USD, for example, while a Lettuce Grow unit that holds 24 plants and includes LED lights costs $849.

Adams said today that part of its new funds will go towards reaching “an even wider audience in the U.S., Canada and around the world.”  

Netled and Oh My Greens Sign €15M Contract to Bring More Vertical Farming to Sweden

Finland’s Netled has signed a three-year investment agreement with herb grower Oh My Greens, the two companies announced today. The agreement is worth €15 million (~$17 million USD) over three years and will provide Sweden-based Oh My Greens with Netled’s turnkey vertical farm called Vera.

Netled’s Vera system comes as a few different forms, the smallest iteration being a cabinet-sized farm that lives in the produce section of a grocery store. Netled also offers a larger in-store model, a larger “compact” model (8 meters by 6 meters), and an industrial-scale version that is modular and can be added to as product demand increases. 

It’s this larger industrial version of Vera that Netled will provide to Oh My Greens, which is owned by Swedish-American investment, management consultancy, and social impact firm Applied Value Group. Oh My Greens sells its potted herbs in Sweden and hopes to gain more share of the market in Sweden through the Netled partnership. Speaking in today’s press release, CEO Moses Isik said his company considered 17 different vertical farming technology providers before deciding on Netled and its Vera system.

The indoor farming system includes LED lighting, a dynamic spacing system, HVAC, a nutrition system, automation software, and production management and horticulture intelligence software. The idea is to provide clients with a plug-and-play vertical farming system that grows more plants faster and saves companies on CAPEX and OPEX costs. 

The deal with Oh My Greens means Netled can build up more of a presence in Sweden, where companies like Urban Oasis and Grönska already operate vertical farms.

Moving forward, Netled will provide technical and consultancy services for its technology while Oh My Greens works on producing and supplying produce to Stockholm retailers. For now, that’ll largely be the usual vertical farming fare of leafy greens and herbs.

Equilibrium Capital Closes a $1.02B Fund for Indoor Ag

Equilibrium Capital has closed its second fund dedicated to indoor agriculture. The Controlled Environment Foods Fund II (CEFF II) raised a total of $1.02 billion, exceeding its original goal of $500 million. 

Speaking in a company blog post, Equilibrium CEO David Chen said that the fundraising for CEFF II reflects a broader shift where larger institutional investors are concerned. “Investors and retailers are increasingly looking for more sustainable and less volatile ways to invest in and scale agriculture. The fund is reflecting the magnitude of the opportunity and the growing importance of CEA in our food system,” he said. 

CEFF II will invest between $10 million and $125 million per deal, mostly in high-tech greenhouses and indoor farms as well as “other CEA segments of alternative proteins and aquaculture.” The fund is focused largely on North America: the United States, Mexico, and Canada. 

Equilibrium’s current assets are mostly in lettuce and tomatoes, which are two of the most popular produce types when it comes to indoor ag. However, Chang name-dropped berries in blog post, saying that Equilibrium will be “dramatically expanding” its presence in the berry family in the future. The statement reflects the larger development for indoor ag where more companies are either currently growing or planning to grow berries. Chang also mentioned peppers, cucumbers, mushrooms, and herbs.

The new fund follows the original CEFF, which closed at $336 million in April 2019 and includes well-known CEA companies like AppHarvest, Revol Greens, and Little Leaf Farms. All of those companies focus on raising crops in high-tech greenhouses, as opposed to the massive vertical farm setups a la AeroFarms or Plenty. Whether CEFF II will invest in more vertical farms remains to be seen. Chang said there were “niche applications” for the technology, though he was not specific about what those applications are. Currently, most vertical farming operations only grow leafy greens and herbs at the kinds of volumes that can supply grocery stores and restaurants. Debate persists as to whether this particular indoor ag format can produce more crops in an environmentally and economically sustainable way.

Wells Fargo Picks 5 Indoor Ag Companies for Its Latest Innovation Incubator Program

Five early-stage indoor agriculture companies will participate in the ninth cohort of the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2), which works with cleantech companies and entrepreneurs across food and housing sectors. Chosen participants for this cohort will focus on tools and processes that can make indoor farming more environmentally and financially sustainable. 

The Wells Fargo Foundation funds the program, which is co-administered by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Indoor ag has seen some major milestones and investments in 2021, but whether its a truly sustainable endeavor (financially and environmentally) remains a hotly debated topic. For example, growing greens inside fully controlled environments like vertical farms might cut down on inputs like land and water usage, but an enormous amount of energy is needed to run a farm off fully on artificial lighting. (Greenhouses, because they use natural sunlight, are usually a different story.) Additionally, leafy greens are still the only crop large-scale vertical farms can grow in huge quantities, and from a calorie perspective, salad can’t fully feed a growing world population.

Claire Kinlaw, director of Innovation Commercialization at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, said in a statement today that this year’s cohort is “focused on validating technologies that address key challenges in the indoor agriculture industry, including environmentally and financially sustainable ways to deliver light, control growth environments, evaluate environmental impacts and solve the need for crop varieties that are well-adapted for indoor environments.”

Companies chosen for the program address these issues and others:

  • Atlas Sensor Technologies monitors water hardness in real time to reduce waste and cost of water and improve how water softeners operate
  • GrowFlux makes intelligent horticulture lighting via an IoT platform the company says can save 20-30 percent in energy costs
  • Motorleaf specializes in AI for indoor ag in order to give growers information around yields and carbon footprint
  • New West Genetics does genomics-assisted breeding for the hemp industry
  • SunPath uses patented fiber optics tech to improve lighting for indoor farms

All participants will receive up to $250,000 in non-dilutive funding from Wells Fargo. Over a 12- to 18-month period, companies will conduct research and development at NREL and at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri. 

How AppHarvest Is Investing in the First Generation of High-Tech Farmers

Agriculture may have been slower to digitize than other parts of the food sector, but these days a lot of folks would agree artificial intelligence, automation, and other technologies have a role to play in the future of farming. The presence of such things means farming will soon require lots of new skills, which in turn means training a whole new generation on a whole new set of tools. It means, in the words of AppHarvest’s founder and CEO Jonathan Webb (pictured above), “getting young people to really visualize what agriculture is” in a way they haven’t before.

Standing under a tent in the middle of a downpour outside Elliott County High School in Sandy Hook, Kentucky recently, Webb explained to me how his company is training the next generation of farmers while simultaneously investing in the company’s own future as a high-tech agricultural powerhouse.

We, along with with students, parents, teachers, and Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, were at the launch for the latest unit of AppHarvest’s high-tech educational container farm program, which teaches high-tech farming to Eastern Kentucky high-school students. Launched back in 2018, the program retrofits old shipping containers to house controlled-environment vertical farms that grow leafy greens. Farms at each school serve as hands-on agricultural classrooms where students can learn not just horticulture but also how to use the technologies powering the next wave of farming innovations around automation, connectivity, and data.

“What we’re doing here is trying to plant the seeds of what it means to be in an exciting industry and get that groundswell early,” Webb told me. 

He was talking specifically about the container farm program but might as well have been referring to the entire company’s MO. AppHarvest, itself a product of Eastern Kentucky, is both a Public Benefit Corporation and a Certified B Corporation, which means the company has to strike a balance between profit and less measurable purposes like environmental impact, transparency, and social good. 

The company’s main business is headquartered about an hour away from Elliott County High School, in Morehead, Kentucky, where AppHarvest operates a 60-acre high-tech greenhouse that grows different varieties of tomatoes. Two additional farms, one for leafy greens and another for tomatoes, are under construction, and the company just broke ground on a couple more last month. All of these farms provide or will provide produce for restaurants and grocery retailers within a day’s drive. They will also provide jobs for a local community that’s seen unemployment rise as the coal industry declines.

The high school container farms are altogether smaller and somewhat different in terms setup and technical specs, but the idea is the same: grow crops in a controlled environment and use technology to improve plant yield, quality, and nutrition profile. In doing so, people from the community get an opportunity to learn the kinds of skills that will be relevant as agriculture gets more and more digitized.

“We’ve tried to say at AppHarvest we’re not building facilities, we’re building an ecosystem,” said Webb. “Obviously our large production facility is the core critical center piece of that, but us investing in a high school education, we’re truly trying to create an ecosystem that includes facilities and the brainpower to be able to operate the facilities.”

This isn’t just feel-good talk, either. Technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, sensors, and analytics are coming to agriculture in response to multiple problems looming in the near future for the global food system. As McKinsey notes, “Demand for food is growing at the same time the supply side faces constraints in land and farming inputs.” With a population expected to grow to 9.7 billion by 2050, the planet needs to produce around 70 percent more available calories. At the same time, inputs like water supply and arable land are shrinking, raising costs for farming and negatively impacting an already burdened planet.

Part of the promise of controlled environment agriculture formats like high-tech greenhouses and container vertical farms is that they can grow more food faster, at a higher quality, and closer to the buying public. Many of these facilities operate via hydroponics systems that recirculate water, saving on that resource. (AppHarvest’s greenhouse runs off rainwater collected from the facility’s roof.) In the case of vertical farming, less land is required because plants are stacked. AppHarvest’s container farms, for example, can pack three to five acres of leafy greens into a forty-foot-long shipping container. Other large-scale vertical farms a la Kalera or Plenty are growing pounds of greens that number in the millions and also exploring additional crops such as berries.

Most individuals in this industry I’ve spoken to agree that indoor farming isn’t “the savior” that will wholly replace traditional agriculture. Nor was it never meant to be. Rather, greenhouse growers, vertical farm companies, and those operating container farms believe we need all of these formats working together and alongside traditional agriculture practices to try and resolve the above issues.

One of the many things needed to make that a reality is a new generation of young people interested in farming as a career and able to navigate the technical as well as horticultural aspects of agriculture. 

Right now, that’s a challenge. “We don’t have our brightest young people inspired to go into agriculture,” said Webb, adding that the issue is, “How do we inspire them early to get into agriculture and the technology sphere of agriculture?”

AppHarvest started investing in its education program before its main facility was ever complete, spending $200,000 of its initial $1 million investment on the program. “I’m not sure if there’s ever been a venture-backed company that’s taken 20 percent of their raised proceeds early and invested in education,” said Webb.

In 2021, AppHarvest has five different container farm programs operating at Eastern Kentucky high schools, all of them operating independently but also networked together, just as AppHarvest’s larger farms will eventually be networked. 

Students learn a huge range of skills working on these farms, from horticultural-related ones like seeding and harvesting to technology management across multiple farms to food safety, data entry, marketing, packaging, and creating a budget. Via a screen inside the farm, students can learn to track the pH levels of plants, carbon dioxide levels, temperature, humidity, and all the other variables present in a farm. And since farms from every high school are networked together, students can view one another’s activity. Elliott County High can see data from Shelby Valley High School in Pike County and vice versa, for example.

Webb says the farms are also an opportunity for schools and students to collaborate using different skillsets, whether technological, horticultural, or otherwise. “Some students might have more of a background or interest in horticulture. Some students might have more of a background or interest in craftsmanship. All we’re trying to do now is say, ‘Here, it’s your thing, bring it to life, and openly share information.’”

And while there’s no pressure, the hope is that some of these students eventually bring their skillsets to AppHarvest’s main operations and help improve them, along with indoor ag, over the coming years. “Hopefully in four years we have students that might end up at MIT. And then they’re telling us what to do,” said Webb, adding that the ROI here isn’t quick. The true impacts of the company’s investment in school programs probably won’t be seen for another five of six years, which is a few lifetimes when we’re talking about tech. 

“We get judged on quarterly earning calls, [but] that’s not the way I think,” he said. “I want us to think, first decade, second decade, third decade, and these are very long-term investments.”

He hopes to see more tech companies investing in high schools, and AppHarvest isn’t quite the lone wolf when it comes to this. Freight Farms, which deals exclusively in container farms, has a partnership with Sodexo to bring its units to K-12 schools and universities in the U.S. AeroFarms, also a Certified B Corp., has partnerships with various schools and community centers, too.

For AppHarvest, the educational program is is an integral part of the operation, and one tied to the company’s long-term success. “It’s not a ‘nice to have,'” Webb told me. “It’s something we truly believe is going to give our company a competitive advantage medium to long term.” 

AeroFarms Talks R&D in the UAE for Vertical Farming

One place that gets a lot of attention these days when it comes to food tech initiatives is the United Arab Emirates. Like Singapore, the country is aggressively pursuing food and ag tech initiatives as a way to improve food security and quality within its own borders and in doing so become a more self-sufficient food producer.

The UAE got another big agrifood boost recently when New Jersey-based vertical farming company AeroFarms announced that its UAE-based subsidiary AeroFarms AgX LTD had started construction on an R&D facility in Abu Dhabi. The center will focus on new developments for indoor ag and controlled environment farming, and is expected to be operational in the first quarter of 2022.

“The region aligns very well with our value proposition,” Aerofarms cofounder and CEO David Rosenberg explained to The Spoon recently. “The UAE imports 90 percent of their crops, so there’s a food security issue. They also have relatively cheap energy.” He added that a facility for R&D in the country gives Aerofarms a “strong regional presence” from which it can expand to other areas in the Middle East and beyond. 

There’s certainly enough opportunity for indoor agriculture in this part of the world. Because of the desert climate, the UAE and other countries in the Middle East deal with a lack of arable land as well as water scarcity. Vertical farming operations like those of AeroFarms or another player, Vertical Field, claim to use significantly less water than traditional outdoor agriculture. And because of the vertical nature of the grow systems (plant trays are literally stacked inside a giant warehouse-like setting), companies can pack more plants into less space than would be possible on a horizontal field.

According to Rosenberg, the R&D center isn’t really to figure out how to grow food in the desert (“We could grow anywhere in the world”) so much as it is about growing plants specific to Middle Eastern eating habits in general. He cites mint and parsley, two popular foods in the region, as examples. Having an R&D center that focused on optimizing the grow cycle for these plants could increase quality, yield, and nutritional profile. 

The other goal of the forthcoming new center will be to apply the learnings discovered there to other parts of the region in the future. That includes research in areas like plant science, vertical farming and automation, accelerating innovation cycles and commercializing products.

Rosenberg says that versus a greenhouse, his company’s vertical farms can grow plants faster, producing around 26 harvests per year instead of 12 to 16. Right now, Aerofarms is best known for leafy greens, but the company has its sights set on other crops, too. In April of this year it announced a deal with Chile-based berry producer and distributor Hortifrut to research and develop blueberry and caneberry production. 

“Today we’re most known for leafy greens, but behind the scenes, we’re working with some of the biggest ag tech companies in the world to improve their genetics,” says Rosenberg. He adds that AeroFarms has grown 70 different varieties of berries, and that of the 550 different plants the company has grown, “probably 350 of them are in the leafy greens category.” He declined to elaborate on other crops, but suggested that information might surface soon to the public.

Last year, the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) invested $150 million in a few ag tech companies, AeroFarms being one of them. The forthcoming R&D facility will be one tangible result of that investment. 

AeroFarms announced in March its intention to go public via SPAC with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. 

Farm.One Launches a New Vertical Farming Facility in Brooklyn

NYC-based indoor ag company Farm.One cut the ribbon on its new urban vertical farm recently, this one located in Brooklyn, New York. According to the Brooklyn Reader, the 10,000-square-foot facility and will start planting seeds in the coming weeks. The Brooklyn farm is the company’s second large-scale farm, following its existing one in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood.

Farm.One started out supplying its vertically grown greens to New York City’s high-end restaurant scene. The original goal was to grow rare, unusual plants restaurant chefs could then use in their dishes, a plan that worked until the COVID-19 pandemic started shutting down restaurants last year. 

In response, Farm.One took the same direct-to-consumer route many companies shifted to in 2020. NYC-based consumers can now sign up for a Farm.One subscription and receive greens and a few other local goods delivered to their doorsteps. The company has also teamed up with Brooklyn-based indoor farming company Smallhold to sell “local luxury mushrooms.” An additional collaborations with Rawsome Treats provides smoothies and plant-based bottled milks. Farm.One uses bikes for all deliveries and packages all items in reusable containers the company retrieves once they are empty. The shift to this model proved so popular that there is currently a waitlist to even get products. 

Hence the new farm space in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights neighborhood, which opened at the end of last week. The space will grow various microgreens as well as herbs and some flowers. All crops are grown using the hydroponic method and artificial lighting, with plants harvested “hours before delivery,” according to the company. 

The Brooklyn farm will also include an event space where attendees can sample plants on “tasting tours” and attend lectures on food and agriculture. In future there may also be a daytime cafe as well as a cocktail menu.

Farm.One also licenses its technology out and currently has locations at the EATALY NYC Flatiron location and a Whole Foods in Manhattan. 

All of these offerings would classify as premium, targeting higher-end consumers. It remains to be seen if Farm.One’s demographic reach will widen as it adds more farms and is able to serve more parts of NYC and beyond.