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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Modern Farmer

Fifth Season Announces Robot-Powered Vertical Farm Near Pittsburgh

Indoor farming company Fifth Season today announced plans for its first commercial-scale vertical farm, which will open in early 2020 in Braddock, PA, an historic steel town near Pittsburgh.

To date, the company — originally founded as RoBotany Ltd. — has raised over $35 million. It incubated at Carnegie Mellon University’s Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship and currently has two test farms in Pittsburgh that supply greens to Giant Eagle and Whole Foods stores in the area, as well as to local restaurants. Fifth Season’s forthcoming new farm will grow over 500,000 pounds of lettuce in the first year of operation. The company plans to expand to additional locations throughout the U.S. in the future.

More importantly, the company, along with its cofounder and CEO Austin Webb, see robotics as a key element to vertical farming. Fifth Season uses a proprietary robotics and AI solution to assist in multiple areas of the vertical farm, from seeding to harvesting to packaging. While humans still work onsite at the farms, the bots take care of much of the heavy lifting — literally, in some cases. As AgFunder pointed out, with robots around, humans don’t have to climb multiple stories to get heavy grow trays with greens needing to be harvested.

Cutting down on this expensive labor could allow Fifth Season to offer its greens at more competitive prices in the future. “We have developed fully integrated, proprietary technology to completely control the hydroponic growing process and optimize key factors such as energy, labor usage and crop output,” Webb said in a statement, adding that the company’s “unprecedented low costs set a new standard for the future of the industry.”

We’re seeing more and more of these large-scale vertical farms that utilize automation to speed up tasks around the farm and also reduce labor costs. That includes fully autonomous systems, like Australia’s Vertical Farm Systems, or farms like Intelligent Growth Systems that use software to make vertical farming easier for those who don’t have an agricultural or engineering background. Kalera, who just broke ground on the Southeast’s largest vertical farm, is looking at fully automated solutions for future locations.

It’s far too soon to tell if any of these solutions will actually deliver the kinds of financial returns to help make vertical farming a more widespread reality, not to mention make it possible to price greens affordably in mainstream grocery retailers. Robots are one answer, and a promising one that that. We’ll need more data on what is and isn’t working, though, to better understand if they’re the entire future of vertical farming or one small piece of a much larger picture.

Newsletter: The Drive Thru Matters More Than Ever. So Do Farm Bots and Decaf Coffee

From self-service kiosks to mobile apps to dedicated pickup shelves and portals, there’s no end to new tech trying to speed up the order-pay-collect process for customers at QSRs.

But if the last week has made anything clear, it’s that while those pieces certainly play a role in the future of the restaurant, the drive thru is still the most important area of growth — at least for fast-food. Even as Minneapolis tries to ban drive thrus, companies are pumping enormous amounts of money and energy into improving this area, most notably with last week’s news that McDonald’s, king of all QSRs, had acquired voice-tech company Apprente. It’s the second acquisition Mickey D’s has made in 2019 of a technology company whose offerings can speed up lagging drive-thru lines and move more customers in less time. In March, the mega chain acquired a company called Dynamic Yield and has since installed its AI tech in thousands of McDonald’s drive thrus to make the order experience more personalized for customers.

Others aren’t sitting still. In 2019 alone, Dunkin’ has expanded its “Next Generation” store, which features dedicated drive-thru lanes for mobile orders, to other parts of the U.S.; KFC started testing a drive-thru-only concept in Australia; and a slew of new tech companies have emerged offering various digital and AI-powered tools to take orders at the drive thru.

It’s not hard to understand why. As of last check, drive thrus still make up over 50 percent (in some cases closer to two thirds) of all orders for many QSRs. At the same time, bigger menus and more disjointed pieces of tech in the restaurant space have slowed down the order process and made wait times in drive-thru lanes longer. As Apprente CEO Itamar Arel, Ph.D., said back in 2018, “Fast food is not always fast and bottlenecks at ordering stations result in lost sales.” McDonald’s and others can’t afford those lost sales, so anything — whether an extra lane or a full-on tech makeover — to move people through the line faster could give QSRs an edge in the rising competition. You can bet there will be plenty more news from the drive-thru lane as more major QSRs revamp to take a page from McDonald’s playbook and reinvent themselves with tech.

Weeding Out the Labor Shortage Problem
The drive-thru isn’t the only area the food world is looking to speed up production. This week a company called FarmWise raised $14.5 million for its self-driving robots that remove weeds from crops without the need for herbicides or pesticides. (We expect these machines will be able to do much more than pull weeds in future, too.)

For the agtech world, machines like these not only save time, they also pick up the slack left by a major labor shortage in farm production. Farmers and ranchers in the U.S. say this labor shortage is the most limiting factor they face on their farms, and it’s not one that looks like it’ll be solved any time soon.

Hence, the robots. Every farm in America won’t have autonomous bots to pick weeds and harvest produce at the snap of a finger, but these machines are an increasingly appealing solution to the labor issue. Robots don’t need breaks, can work in sweltering heat and humidity, and in some cases can work faster than a human. As we look to solutions for both farm labor and wasted crops on the farm, these bots hold many possibilities.

Photo: Decafino

Disrupting Decaf
Meanwhile, someone wants to reinvent decaf coffee.

Decafino, a startup based out of Seattle, launched a Kickstarter campaign today for a tea bag-like product it claims can remove caffeine from any cup of brewed coffee. As my colleague Catherine Lamb detailed, the biodegradable pouch can be dropped in a cup of coffee (or caffeinated soda, for that matter), and within three to four minutes will remove the caffeine from the beverage.

If the product does as it claims, it could open up many more options for decaf coffee drinkers, who often face very limited selections at stores and coffee shops, and in some cases no options at all.

Personally, I’d have to be told I needed triple bypass surgery to stop drinking caffeinated coffee, and no doubt that day will come. In the meantime, there are plenty of folks out there who love the taste of coffee but for health reasons cannot drink the real thing. If Decafino is successful, these people might find a whole new world of drink choices.

FarmWise Raises $14.5M for Autonomous Weeding Agriculture Robot

FarmWise announced today that it has raised a $14.5 million Series A round of funding for its autonomous agriculture robots. The round was led by Calibrate Ventures with participation from Wilbur Ellis, Xplorer Capital and Alumni Ventures Group. This brings the total amount raised by FarmWise to $20.2 million.

Farmwise builds self-driving robots that use a combination of computer vision and AI to identify weeds among crops and precision mechanical tools to remove them without the need for herbicides. According to the press release sent to The Spoon, FarmWise says its robots have removed weeds from more than 10 million plants. The company will use the new funding to scale up its robotics engineering and operations team and further develop its R&D efforts on “plant-level detection and actuation capabilities.”

Agricultural applications are ripe for automation. The industry is facing a labor shortage, and even when running at full employment, farm work is hard work involving long days out in the hot sun. Robots can run all day without needing a break or suffering heat stroke. To help fill in the human labor gap, there are plenty of agbots getting funding and currently making their way to market, including Augean’s Burro, Advanced Farm Technologies‘ strawberry-picking robot and Bear Flag Robotics‘ autonomous tractors.

Robots like those from FarmWise can also accelerate the move towards more organic farming. With mechanical weed removal, there’s no need for spraying herbicides and pesticides. And it’s pretty safe to assume that FarmWise isn’t just in the business of pulling weeds. If it’s, err, wise, it would build out its robots to be a more versatile platform with a broad array of applications that can be used across a farm.

Marks & Spencer Plants Urban Farms In Its Retail Stores

We’ve seen vertical farms make their way into restaurants, hotels, and college cafeterias. Now the concept is getting more popular in grocery stores.

This week, UK-based department store chain Marks & Spencer announced a partnership with Infarm to bring vertical farms into M&S food stores.

Berlin-based Infarm makes high-tech vertical farming pods that use a cloud-based automated platform to control light, air, and nutrients inside the farm and monitor plant growth. The company, which raised a $100 million Series B round in June, already has partnerships in place with several food retailers in Europe including Intermarche, Migros, and Amazon Fresh.

The Marks & Spencer partnership, which is Infarm’s first one with a UK retailer, launched yesterday at M&S’s newly re-opened Clapham Junction store in London. The farm currently grows three different types of basil as well as mountain coriander, mint, and parsley. Customers themselves won’t be able to harvest the greens — that job goes to Infarm farmers, who will visit the store twice per week. But M&S customers will at least know exactly where their herbs came from. Infarm is constructing distribution centers in London that will provide seedlings, which then get transported right to the store.

Marks & Spencer said in a press release they plan to expand the partnership to six more London stores by the end of the year.

The vertical farming industry — projected to reach $12.77 billion by 2026 — is still figuring out its role in the future food system, and many questions remain around how to best deploy farms in densely populated urban areas to get more people fresh, locally sourced produce. Putting the goods in the same place consumers buy the rest of their food is a good place to start. Now we’ll have to see if supply can match demand, and vice versa.

Verdeat Delays Kickstarter Launch for Its Hydroponic Garden System

Poznań, Poland-based company Verdeat sent a message out today stating the launch of its hydroponic garden system for the home has been delayed one week, until September 17.

When it finally arrives, Verdeat’s product will be an indoor hydroponic grow system controlled by a smartphone app and designed to fit inside your house or apartment. Like a growing number of at-home hydroponic systems, Verdeat automates much of the grow process, calculating how much water, light, and nutrients plants need and requiring human intervention only once every few weeks. The device will be available in small, medium, or large sizes and, depending on that size, can hold up to 76 plants. Verdeat has not yet released pricing details for any of the unit sizes.

The campaign, which was announced in June of this year, was originally supposed to launch in July. This morning’s message had this to say about the delays:

As you know perfecting a prototype can be very time consuming and we want to make sure the product will be worthy of Kickstarter backers before it is released.

In the same message, the company also said it wants to make Verdeat as eco-friendly as possible, with minimal negative environmental impact by offset CO2 emissions from shipping products by contributing to the UN emission reduction program.

While Verdeat’s campaign delays are a little eyebrow-raising, they’re not necessarily bad news. Hardware products, in particular, are susceptible to all kinds of production issues that can hamper progress. As the recent mystery surrounding the state of the Rite Press shows, many a Kickstarter campaign has been marred by companies gladly taking a crowd’s funding but never actually delivering the product. Better to delay a campaign launch by a few weeks than wind up with no product at all for your backers.

And hopefully, these delays mean that when the campaign finally launches next week, Verdeat will have a higher-quality, more eco-friendly product to show off.

Bee Vectoring Technologies Gets EPA Approval for its Bee-Delivered Fungicide

Bee Vectoring Technologies (BVT), a Toronto-based startup that uses bees to deliver pesticides, got a nice regulatory boost this week when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved the company’s fungicide for use on commercial crops. This also marks the first time the EPA has approved any product for delivery by bees.

Clonostachys rosea CR-7, which is sold under the name Vectorite, is an organic fungicide that is labeled for use on strawberries, blueberries, sunflowers and almonds. It is a powder that is held in trays that sit outside commercial beehives. As we wrote last year, when bees exit the hive, the powder, which BVT says is not harmful to bees, gets on their feet. As the bees land on a plant and shake a flower to release pollen, the fungicide is dropped. This surgical type of delivery can give farmers more precise pesticide application methods than they might get with broad spraying.

I spoke with Ashish Malik, President and CEO of BVT, who explained that CR-7 is derived from a micro-organism found in soil around the world. BVT has isolated a particular strain that can colonize plant tissue quickly and helps fight of botrytis in fruit, which manifests as a fuzzy grey mold.

BVT’s tray holds the CR-7 for bees to walk on as they leave the hive.

“We have a number of studies and results from trials and every single trial we’ve done we’ve shown a positive effect, 20 – 25 percent better yields in strawberries,” Malik said. The results were even higher with blueberries, according to BVT press materials sent to The Spoon that said there was a 77 percent bump in fruit yield with CR-7 as well as a 50 percent gain in the number of marketable berries.

In addition to better yields, Malik said that there is early evidence that BVTs fungicide can help keep strawberries fresher longer, though he was insistent that more trials needed to be conducted before they made that claim official. If those early freshness results are borne out with further testing, it’s not hard to imagine CR-7 being used in conjunction with other startups like AgShift and Apeel in fighting food waste. CR-7 could prolong food freshness while AgShift helps route food to locations based on freshness, and Apeel would extend that freshness even longer. All of this is in theory, anyway.

Up until now, BVT has been in testing with university researchers as well as some farm demonstrations. With the EPA approval, BVT now has license to operate CR-7 as a biological fungicide commercially. “This gives us credibility in the eyes of US grower, but also outside the US,” said Malik.

Though BVT is small, it is already listed on the Toronto stock exchange. As the company looks to scale up production, Malik said it would raise the money to do so by issuing more common stock. With the EPA approval, the buzz on BVT might just be starting.

Nectar Raises $1.1M CAD Seed Round for its IoT Beehive Monitoring Tech

Nectar, the startup that creates IoT sensors and software for more precise commercial beehive management, has raised a $1.1 million CAD (~$824,000) seed round of funding. According to Betakit, which first reported the story, “The round was led by Interdomus Capital, and saw participation from Real Ventures, Upper Canada Equity Fund, First Stone Venture Partners, Third Estate Investments, and other angel impact investors sourced through MaRS’s impact investing platform, SVX.”

Bees are vital to our food supply. As we wrote last year when we first covered Nectar:

According to the USDA, “One out of every three bites of food in the United States depends on honey bees and other pollinators. Honey bees pollinate $15 billion worth of crops each year, including more than 130 fruits and vegetables.” But since 2006, roughly 30 percent of beehives have collapsed due to disease, pesticides and loss of habitat.

Nectar works by inserting a “Beecon” sensor into a hive, which monitors temperature, humidity, audio and movement activity. That data is beamed from the Beecon to the BeeHub station, which transmits the data to the cloud where it is analyzed by Nectar’s software. Beekeepers can then better monitor their hives to see if a new queen is hatching, if the temperature is correct, hive mortality rates and more.

Nectar isn’t the only startup catching the buzz on bee management. ApisProtect in Ireland uses IoT sensors for commercial hives as well, and BroodMinder is an open source solution for bee hobbyists.

Prior to this seed round, Nectar was a part of the Founder Fuel accelerator in Canada, which provided $100,000 (CAD). Nectar told Betakit it will use the new funding to grow its presence in North America and work with more commercial beekeepers and farmers.

Advanced Farm Technologies Raises $7.5M Series A for its Strawberry Picking Robot

Advanced Farm Technologies (AFT), an agtech robotics startup, has raised a $7.5 million Series A round of funding led by Yamaha Motor Ventures & Laboratory Silicon Valley (“YMVSV”), the strategic business development and investment arm of Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd., with participation from Kubota Corporation, Catapult Ventures, and Impact Venture Capital. This brings the total amount raised by AFT to $9.2 million.

Based in Davis, CA, AFT creates robots as a service for farmers. It has developed the T-6 robotic strawberry harvester which operates on farms in the Oxnard, Santa Maria, and Salinas-Watsonville areas of California.

Agriculture is a hot area for robotics companies and automation. In addition to the fact that farms are facing a human labor shortage, farm work is hard work. It entains repetitive, manual labor often in hot conditions. Automating some of those tasks would help save people from getting heat stroke or dehydration after being out in the fields all day. Robots can also pave the way towards more efficient farming with precision application of water and pesticides.

Despite their potential benefits, robots haven’t had the best track record when it comes to picking strawberries. Even with the aid of computer vision, ripe berries can be hard to spot. They’re also fragile, so plucking them has to be done with the right amount of robotic care.

Perhaps this is why so many companies are tackling the problem. In addition to AFT, CROO Robotics, Traptic, and Agrobot are all working on robotic strawberry harvesters.

For its part, AFT says it will use the new funds to further expand its robotic strawberry harvesting program and “innovate in other areas.” If the company can nail robotic strawberry picking, that will indeed be pretty sweet.

CropX Raises $10M for its Soil Sensor and Analytics Platform

CropX, a Tel-Aviv based soil analytics startup, announced today that it has raised $10 million in new funding (h/t Axios Pro Rata). According to the press announcement new investors include strategic partner Sumitomo Corporation Europe, Armada Investments and TaL Capital, which joined existing investors such as Finistere Ventures, Germin8 Ventures, GreenSoil Investments, Innovation Endeavors and OurCrowd. This brings the total amount raised by CropX to $22.9 million.

There are two components to the CropX product: a hardware sensor and cloud-based software. The CropX sensor is a screw-shaped device that farmers literally screw into the ground. This screw shape is actually one of the ways CropX differentiates itself in the soil analyzing space because the threads of the device give it more surface area than straight tube-shaped sensors. Placing sensors on the threads of a CropX allows water to pass through the sensor not just around it.

As water passes through these sensors, information is sent up to the cloud where CropX’s software analyzes the soil for moisture levels, temperature and electroconductivity to determine salinity levels. Results are sent to a mobile app where the farmer can better manage nutrient management and fertilizer application.

But the bigger play for CropX is data. As we wrote last year:

Sensors cost from $600 to $899 apiece and there is a $275 yearly subscription per sensor. Farmers own their own data, and anything CropX learns is anonymous and on an aggregate basis. But it’s these data insights that are the real play for CropX. [CropX CEO Tomar] Tzach wouldn’t go into specifics but said that eventually, the company will be able to “provide significant data to other industries and geographies.”

CropX is among a, well, crop of companies looking to give farmers greater insight into their dirt. Other players in the soil sensing space include Teralytic and Arable.

As part of today’s announcement, CropX also said that it has brought on John Vikupitz as its new president, where he will focus on scaling the company.

Farm’d is a Marketplace for Restaurants to More Easily Buy From Local Farms

There are lots of reasons that buying local food is better. It’s better for the environment, better for the community, and better tasting. But for restaurants and retailers, buying locally sourced food may not be easier. That’s why Farm’d created a B2B marketplace to connect those food buyers with local food growers.

The premise is pretty simple. Farmers can list and sell their products on Farm’d’s service, and chefs and other food buyers in that area can select and buy them. Farm’d Co-Founder and CEO Chris Damico got the idea when he was a restauranteur and looking to buy local produce. “There was no economical way to get locally sourced food,” said Damico, “and I was frustrated by the options the Syscos of the world were offering.”

So Damico launched Farm’d in January of 2018. “We have a 400 restaurants and retailers on the platform. We’ve got 70 farms selling 1,200 SKUs, all within three hours of Atlanta.”

Right now, Farm’d facilitates meat, dairy and produce sales. Since produce is seasonal and not every fruit or veggie is available in every region year-round, Damico says that it’s only 30 percent of Farm’d’s sales.

“Anybody can sell tomatoes,” Damico said. “You’re not going to buy beef from just anybody. That’s how are we different. Direct, transparent and favorable.”

Another key differentiator for Farm’d, according to Damico, is that the company doesn’t own or use any warehouses, and delivery drivers are all independent contractors. “The farm is the warehouse,” Damico said. “We pick it up when someone wants it and our IP is in the routing.” Damico said that deliveries are made on a daily basis.

So far, Farm’d has raised roughly $3 million in seed and angel funding. The company makes money by charging farmers a straight 10 percent cut of its sales generates via the platform. Farmers can set their own price and tack on the 10 percent fee on top of their sales or subtract it from the total.

Farm’d is part of an interesting overall trend of startups that are in the business of connecting volume food buyers with smaller brands. Pod Foods is a marketplace that connects retailers with smaller CPG brands, and WeStock is a platform for consumers to tell their local grocers which brands they would like to see in store.

Given that Farm’d is simply a marketplace, and says that its special sauce is more in the logistics of food delivery, there’s no reason that it can’t scale relatively quickly to new markets. They still need to enlist new farmers and drivers, but no matter where you are in the country restaurants want food and farmers want to sell food.

If that happens, eating local while eating out could become easier than ever.

Newsletter: Are Vertical Farms Ready to Grow More Than Lettuce?

Greetings from the South, ground zero for sweet tea, land of unrelenting humidity, future home of a massive new vertical farming operation.

This week, an Orlando, FL-based company called Kalera (formerly Eco Convergence Group), announced that it has broken ground on a semi-autonomous vertical farming facility that will produce 5 million heads of lettuce each year, supplying Orlando and central Florida restaurants, hotels, and grocery stores with fresh greens and underscoring the growing demand for locally grown produce.

As soon as I got the news, the usual question about vertical farming entered my brain: why is it always lettuce? From Kalera’s new operation to AeroFarms’ 70,000-square-foot New Jersey farm to IGS’ fully automated vertical farm, we hear lots of talk of leafy greens, herbs, and the occasional edible flower. But nobody’s yet growing eggplant, potato, or even carrots.

Kalera’s CEO and cofounder, Cristian Toma, had a lot to say about that when I asked him about this: Unlike lettuce — short plants that can be densely packed together to maximize volume — many other types of produce need lots of space to grow upwards and outwards. In some cases they require multiple harvests. Most of them need human hands to assist with things like pruning, and all of these needs add up to the kinds of space and labor costs vertical farms simply can’t sustain right now. Not at scale, anyway.

That doesn’t mean we won’t see more non-leafy greens in vertical farms at some point in the future. As I noted this morning:

Whether the day ever comes when we’ll see vertical farms growing, say, carrots, depends a lot on developments in plant science in the future. “The varieties we are working with right now over many many years evolved to meet the challenges for outdoor production,” says Toma. “We don’t have varieties bred specifically for indoor production yet. So that’s an area where the industry can develop.”

Image courtesy of Princeton University

Princeton Vertical Farming Project Shutters Its Doors — For Now

More data on growing methods might help. That’s been the credo of Paul P.G. Gauthier, former associate research scholar in plant physiology and environmental plant metabolism at Princeton University and the founder of the Princeton Vertical Farming Project.

Unfortunately, word got out late last week that PVFP has closed its doors following Gauthier’s departure from the university. We shouldn’t shutter the conversation on his ideas, however, especially those around the use of data in vertical farms. Back in January, Gauthier told The Spoon that the vertical farming industry needs more data on best practices for growing plants that can be shared around the industry in a kind of open-source framework. More data on what’s working and what isn’t could give us a more realistic idea of whether, say, tomatoes are a realistic crop to grow at large scale or if they’re better off in a greenhouse setting.

Gauthier has taken a job as Professor of Plant Science at Delaware Valley University and said he hopes to reproduce the vertical farm model from Princeton on a larger scale, and that there’s a possibility of even reviving the PVFP at Princeton in the future.

Starship’s Autonomous Delivery Bots Land on Another Campus

While vertical farms move closer to automation, more automated delivery bots are also moving onto college campuses. Starship upped the number of food delivery robots this week by announcing that its bots have landed at the University of Pittsburgh and Purdue University, joining campuses like George Mason University and Northern Arizona University, both of whom launched delivery programs with Starship earlier this year.

Starship is one of a few companies testing delivery programs with these small, wheeled bots. Kiwi, too, has bots on a number of campuses — including, possibly Purdue, a potential overlap that suggests campus is the next battleground for autonomous delivery. It is, after all, the perfect testing ground: as my colleague Chris Albrecht noted when he tested out a Kiwi earlier this year, college campuses are an ideal piloting ground for these companies: “Colleges are contained geographic areas with lots of hungry people ordering food from on-campus or nearby establishments well into the night,” he wrote.

Personally, I’m waiting for the day a six-wheeled autonomous bot can deliver a hydroponically grown baked potato to my doorstep, but if the economics of vertical potato farms don’t pan out, I’d always settle for lettuce.

Stay cool,
Jenn

Eco Convergence Group Rebrands as Kalera, Breaks Ground on Southeast’s Largest Indoor Vertical Farm

Vertical farming company Eco Convergence Group announced this morning it has officially rebranded as Kalera. The Orlando, FL-based company, best known for its HyCube grow system, also said it has broken ground on what will be the largest vertical farm in the Southeastern United States, growing 5 million heads of lettuce annually.

Speaking on the phone last week, Kalera Cofounder and CEO Cristian Toma said the company expects to begin production on the new indoor farm in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Founded in 2010, Kalera is best known for introducing onsite hydroponic farming to the hospitality industry via the HyCube vertical farming facility, which launched in 2018 at the Orlando World Center Marriott resort. The facility, which is housed next door to the resort’s main kitchen, provides greens for the hotel’s nine dining establishments. In addition to being an attraction Mariott can pitch in a sales deck, Toma says the HyCube also cuts the hotel’s carbon footprint down because the kitchens no longer have to have greens shipped in from distributors.

That idea of local is at the heart of Kalera’s forthcoming production facility, which will, in addition to growing the aforementioned 5 million heads of lettuce each year, serve the Orlando area as well as parts of central Florida. While he didn’t name any specific retailers, Toma Kalera is in talks with grocery chains in the area and will also serve hospitality businesses like restaurants and hotels.

Kalera uses a combination of IoT, data analytics, AI-powered process automation and cleanroom technology to monitor plant growth and ensure the correct “recipe” of lights, nutrients, and water is administered to optimize crop growth. Toma says that for future facilities — of which there will be multiple, if the one currently under construction is a success — there is potential for a fully automated operation where machines can plant crops, move the grow trays, and even harvest plants.

Right now, Kalera is focused mainly on the Southeast U.S. Though Toma didn’t have specific dates, the company plans to expand into other parts of the region in the future. He also mentioned Nordic countries as a potential target for expansion. “The climate over there is very conducive to controlled environment agriculture, and those countries are looking for imports, especially leafy greens.”

Whether or not we’ll ever see more than leafy greens in vertical farming is a question of both economics and plant science, according to Toma. For Kalera and most other vertical farming companies, lettuces and herbs are “the lowest hanging fruit” to grow because they’re short plants that can be packed densely together. In theory, at least, the more plants you can grow, the more you can sell, thereby getting a return for the money spent on power, water, and other factors needed to keep an indoor hydroponic farm up and running.

“I believe other vegetables would take a lot of labor [e.g., pruning], [and] they have multiple harvests from the same plant, so you need to have people performing all these operations,” he says.

Whether the day ever comes when we’ll see vertical farms growing, say, carrots, depends a lot on developments in plant science in future. “The varieties we are working with right now over many many years evolved to meet the challenges for outdoor production,” says Toma. “We don’t have varieties bred specifically for indoor production yet. So that’s an area where the industry can develop.”

Toma suggests that while the enthusiasm is there for the $2.51 billion vertical farming market, the industry is reaching a point where it needs to start showing some success in the form of numbers. “There’s been a lot of hype around the industry lately,” he says. “That’s great because it’s part of this new revolution in agriculture. But at one point, we do need to show good returns. Capital is impatient. It [will] fly to ‘the next big thing’ if you don’t show a good return on investment.”

Now we’ll wait and see if 5 million heads of lettuce annually can deliver on that return.