• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Skip to navigation
Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

  • Home
  • Podcasts
  • Events
  • Newsletter
  • Connect
    • Custom Events
    • Slack
    • RSS
    • Send us a Tip
  • Advertise
  • Consulting
  • About
The Spoon
  • Home
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Events
  • Advertise
  • About

Modern Farmer

March 11, 2021

Sweden’s Grönska Raises $2.4M to Expand Its Vertical Farming Operation

Swedish vertical farming company Grönska announced today it has raised 20.5 million SEK (~$2.4 million). Investors in the round include 82an Invest, PEAS Industries, Rite Ventures, Martas Explorers, Daniel Sachs AB, and Investor Group led by Tectonic Shift.

There are two different parts of Grönska’s business. The company grows leafy greens in a fully controlled vertical farming environment, then sells the produce via retailers and restaurants, including Coop, ICA, and Urban Deli. 

The company also recently launched its GrowOff cultivation system, which is a smaller, five-story controlled-environment grow system. Grönska ships pre-seeded trays to users, who can track plant growth from a corresponding smartphone app. While theoretically the system could work anywhere, its size — on par with Farm.One and Babylon Microfarms — is probably best suited to a grocery store or restaurant environment. 

Europe has historically been known more for greenhouse technology than the massive vertical farms rapidly expanding across the U.S. However there is a growing number of startups in Europe now using the vertical method. Last year, Nordic Harvest struck a deal with Taiwan-based Yes Health Group to build out a massive vertical farm outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. On a smaller scale, Berlin, Germany’s InFarm has expanded its pod-like vertical farms across numerous grocery retail stores in the U.S. and Europe. Meanwhile, Finland’s iFarm licensees its grow system to other companies in Europe and the Middle East.

Grönska said in today’s press release that it is seeing high demand for GrowOff. Moving forward, the company’s focus will be on increasing sales and production in Sweden and around Europe. This week’s funding round will also allow Grönska to further develop the technology powering both its farm and its GrowOff systems.

March 11, 2021

Oishii Raises $50M to Raise More High-End, Vertically Grown Strawberries

Vertical farming company Oishii has raised $50 million in Series A funding, according to a press release sent to The Spoon today. The round was led by SPARX Group’s Mirai Creation Fund II, with participation from Sony Innovation Fund, PKSHA Technology, Social Starts, and several angel investors. It brings Oishii’s total funding to date to $55 million.

With the new funds, Oishii will expand its flagship vertical farm, which is located just outside of New York City. Unlike the majority of companies currently in the vertical farming space, Oishii does does not grow the standard leafy greens and herbs. Instead, the company grows strawberries — specifically, the Omakase variety.

The Omakase Berry typically only grows for a short part of the year in a very specific region of Japan. Oishii founder and CEO Hiroki Koga decided, when building out his vertical farm, to attempt to replicate the elements of a perfect day in Japan (e.g., humidity levels, light) inside a controlled-environment farm in the U.S. The realist is an Omakase Berry that can grow 365 days per year.

The Oishii grow system combines the automation technologies found on many vertical farms today with traditional strawberry cultivation methods developed in Japan specifically for the Omakase berry.

Oishii first introduced its berries in 2018; they are currently available for pickup and delivery in New York City. As produce goes, these products aren’t cheap. A pack of eight strawberries goes for $50, not including delivery fees or tip. Berries are also available at select retailers around New York City, most of them high-end speciality food shops.

Given its price point and limited availability, Oishii’s Omakase Berry is probably not destined to reach huge numbers of consumers — the goal of many other controlled ag farming operations. Instead, the mission seems to be about providing U.S.-based consumers with the experience of tasting something they would ordinarily only be able to get in one tiny region at one time of year.

Oishii said that this week’s funding will go also go towards developing other varieties of strawberries as well as growing other types of produce, such as tomatoes.

The company joins SinGrow, Plenty, and others in moving vertical farming beyond leafy greens. 

March 11, 2021

Nordetect Raises $1.5M for Lab-on-a-Chip Controlled Ag Analysis

Nordetect, a Danish startup that provides portable nutrient testing for indoor and vertical farms, announced yesterday that it has raised a $1.5 million round of Seed funding. The round was led by Luminate NY with participation from Rockstart, SOSV (HAX), PreSeed Ventures and Vækstfonden (The Danish Growth Fund).

The company was founded in 2016 and makes a “lab-on-a-chip” testing device that can analyze agricultural samples for nutrients such as Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium and more. Nordetect’s one-click device and test kits can test conducts multiple tests in a matter of minutes.

For indoor and controlled ag farms, Nordetect says that its test can help growers maintain and balance proper levels of nutrients, water and light for greater crop yields.

There are plenty of ag sensor companies helping farmers better understand their growing conditions. However, soil sensor companies like CropX, Arable and Teralytic are all built for outdoor use. Given the rush of funding that went into and the expansion of indoor farms last year, there will undoubtedly be a number of sensor solutions that come to market for the controlled ag space. With all of that increased funding and expansion, indoor ag companies will need to maximize their yield to prove out the promise of controlled agriculture

Last August, Nordetect’s technology won top honors (and €10,000) at agtech company Priva’s Horti Heroes challenge, which showcased innovative horticultural companies. In this week’s press announcement, Nordetect said that it will use its new funding to commercialize it technology platform and give indoor and vertical farmers in the U.S and Western Europe early access to its lab-on-a-chip analysis devices.

March 10, 2021

Online Grocer Cropswap Launches New Feature to Help Food Insecure Families

“Farm-to-phone” grocery platform Cropswap today announced a partnership with Nourish LA to bring healthier food donations to underserved residents of Los Angeles.

Food insecurity, which the USDA defines as “the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways,” has increased over the last year. Los Angeles county alone estimates that “nearly 1 in 4 residents” in that county has suffered food insecurity since the COVID-19 pandemic started. 

Cropswap, which launched during the pandemic, connects its users with local farmers via an app. In June of last year, the company also launched a subscription service through which customers can get delivery or pickup orders of produce, seeds, and other items on a regular basis. 

For the Nourish LA partnership, Cropswap as added an in-app donation feature that lets users give a seasonal Harvest Box to those in need for $50. The box is filled with organic produce from Sow a Heart Farm, in Fillmore, California, and contains what Cropswap says is enough to sustain a family for one week. Users can simply add the donation to their existing total. Cropswap and Nourish LA handle the actual process of getting the food to its recipients. 

Given that they’re a relatively easy way to encourage giving, in-app donation buttons have surfaced in multiple different areas of the food industry over the last twelve months. Uber Eats last year set up an in-app donation button to help struggling independent restaurants. Also last year, Delivery Hero partnered with the United Nation’s World Food Programme’s Share the Meal program. Users can donate a meal via the regular Delivery Hero app interface.

A $50 box of food is obviously more costly for the giver than, say, donating a few bucks or a single meal. However, online grocery has seen a surge in new users over the last year, and consumer enthusiasm for buying from local farms has also increased. Those two factors working together means there’s a much bigger potential audience for Cropswap’s self-proclaimed “Instacart for local produce.” That in turn means a wider pool of those able to and/or willing to donate a week’s worth of food to those in need.

March 9, 2021

Wefarm Raises $11M to Expand Its Knowledge-Sharing Platform for Small-Scale Farmers

U.K.-based Wefarm announced today it has raised $11 million in Series A funding for its knowledge-sharing platform for small-scale farmers. The round was led by Octopus Ventures with participation from new and existing investors including True Ventures, Robo Frontier Ventures, LocalGlobe, June Fund, and AgFunder. The investment brings Wefarm’s total to $32 million.

The company says it will use the new funding to expand its service from an SMS-based tool to a fully online platform where farmers can share knowledge and advice as well as get access to a marketplace of retailers.

Wefarm started in 2015 as a simple SMS tool for small-scale farmers around the world to connect with one another and share farming know-how. Since then, the company has also added a Retailer network that connects farmers with nearby, independent retailers known for selling high-quality, trusted farm products. The underlying goal with both networks is to put more power in the hands of farmers when it comes to knowledge-sharing and buying and selling goods. 

The platform started as a simple SMS tool because many small-scale farmers around the world do not have reliable access to the internet. They do, however, typically have mobile phones, and WeFarm says that since its launch, 37 million conversations have taken place with its SMS tool.

Wefarm’s launch of a fully online platform comes at a time when internet connectivity is less scarce than it used to be in certain parts of the world. In a statement sent to The Spoon, Wefarm CEO Kenny Ewan noted that the world’s small-scale farming community “is ready to expand into an online space with us.”

The online expansion arrives as a forum-like platform that will “enable farmers to work together to solve problems, support each other, and aggregate their buying and selling power to change the global supply chain.” Farmers can also continue to use the SMS tool if they prefer.

March 9, 2021

Plenty Expands to More Stores in Northern California, Launches Text-a-Farmer Feature

Vertical farming company Plenty today announced an expansion to 17 more Safeway stores across Northern California, as well as a new tech feature that lets shoppers text Plenty’s farmers directly.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the Northern California expansion is part of the multi-year deal between Plenty and Safeway parent company Albertsons. Through that deal, leafy greens grown in Plenty’s controlled-environment vertical farming facility in the San Francisco Bay Area get shipped to Albertsons stores up and down California. The goal is to eventually get plenty’s produce into more than 430 Albertsons stores, including those under the Safeway and Vons brands.

Simultaneous to this expansion is the launch of what Plenty calls its Text-a-Farmer feature. The tool functions much like its name suggests. A sign in the grocery store’s produce section will display a number users can text questions to. Those questions can be about anything related to Plenty’s produce, from “How should I store my greens?” to “Is your packaging recyclable?” Plenty farmers answer the questions in real time via text with the customer.

The Text-a-Farmer feature will be available at stores selling Plenty’s produce. The idea is to give shoppers more information about their food while they are still in the store.

Commercial-scale vertical farming as a whole, meanwhile, continues to expand, raking in the investment dollars in the process. Bowery, based on the East Coast U.S., recently announced its most “technologically advanced” farm to date, while Orlando, Florida-based Kalera is building out facilities across the U.S., including Colorado and Texas. On the investment front, GoodLeaf just raised $65 million to expand across Canada, Stockholm, Sweden-based Urban Oasis raised $1.2 million, and Plenty itself nabbed $140 million. The latter happened this past October.

Around the time of that investment, Plenty also announced a partnership with Driscoll’s to grow strawberries via vertical farming. Plenty also operates a farm in Compton, California, to service southern parts of the state. 

March 4, 2021

GoodLeaf Farms Raises $65M, Plans Vertical Farm Expansion Across Canada

GoodLeaf Farms announced this week it has raised more than $65 million from food manufacturer McCain Foods and is set to embark on “an aggressive growth and expansion plan” for its network of vertical farms, according to an email sent to The Spoon.

Based in Ontario, Canada, GoodLeaf grows leafy greens inside a controlled-environment vertical farm via hydroponics and its own proprietary tech setup that controls light, temperature, and humidity levels, as well as other elements on the farm. The company opened its first farm in 2019 in Guelph, Ontario. According to this week’s press release, two more farms are slated to open in Canada 2021: one in the Eastern side of the country and one out west. Exact locations will be announced soon.

“It is our intention to build farms that support the Canadian grocery store network, food service industry and consumers,” GoodLeaf CEO Barry Murchie said in a statement sent to The Spoon. Currently, the company provides greens to a number of brick-and-mortar as well as grocery stores servicing Ontario, including Fortinos, Whole Foods, and Bondi Produce.

One of GoodLeaf’s goal with its farms is to produce greens closer to where Canadian consumers actually shop for food, rather than these consumers having to buy produce shipped from the U.S. and Mexico. It’s a goal echoed by other Canadian control ag companies, including Lufa Farms, which is growing greens on Montreal rooftops, and Elevate Farms, which is bringing vertical farming to food-insecure areas in the country. Bringing production closer to consumers also means fewer miles to transport the food, which is better for the environment.

With its forthcoming farms, GoodLeaf will serve more grocery outlets as well as foodservice businesses beyond Ontario and across Canada.

March 3, 2021

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.

March 2, 2021

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. 

February 25, 2021

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. 

February 24, 2021

Driscoll’s is Using Consumer Physics Technology to Bring Sweeter Berries to Market

Driscoll’s announced last week that it will be using Consumer Physics‘ SCiO technology to improve the sweetness of the berries it sells.

Before we get into the technology, it’s good to understand how Driscoll’s works. As Brie Reiter Smith, Driscoll’s Director of Quality Systems Design, explained to me by phone this week, Driscoll’s has roughly 1,000 berry growers in its network. The quality of the berries it receives though, can very greatly — even from growers in the same region.

A decade or so ago, this disparity wasn’t a huge deal, but as Reiter Smith explained, that has changed. “Over the years, the breeding programs and supply chains have improved,” Reiter Smith said. “Consumers are more aware of how flavorful fruit can be.”

In other words, consumers know what they want, and they want sweeter berries. To incentivize growers to produce sweeter berries, Driscoll’s began analyzing berry sugar content, which is measured on the Brix scale. Traditionally, Driscoll’s had done this Brix measurement by hand by selecting sample berries, crushing them and using a refractomer to analyze the juice. But this process is time consuming and destructive. On the scale that Driscoll’s operates, that’s a lot of product that goes to testing instead of store shelves to be sold.

This is where Consumer Physics and its SCiO comes in. We covered the company before, back in 2017, when its handheld near infrared spectrometry scanner was being used by Cargill to measure dry matter in cattle forage, and then again in 2019 when it was used to measure moisture in cacao beans.

Since then, Consumer Physics has developed the larger SCiO Cup, which, in the case of Driscoll’s, allows an entire clamshell of strawberries to be scanned at one time. Berries are scanned using the near infrared spectrometry, a cloud-based system that analyzes the findings and provides the Brix measurement via mobile app. This automated bulk approach is faster because berries don’t need to be hand selected and crushed. Since the berries aren’t destroyed, they can be returned to be sold.

We’re seeing more of this type of high-tech, automated scanning enter the food supply chain. AgShift and Intello Labs both use computer vision and AI to assess the quality of food and establish fair market prices. AgShift’s bulk scanner, Hydra, was actually being used by Driscoll’s back in 2019.

Driscoll’s has a reward system for growers that produce higher-value berries. With the results of the Brix analysis, farmers can adjust their berry growing and harvesting to achieve that higher sugar content. That, in turn, means sweeter berries at your local store.

According to last week’s press announcement, Driscoll’s will start integrating SCiO measurement this month in the U.S. Mexico and Canada. By the end of the year, the company will rely exclusively on SCiO for Brix measurement in the roughly 2 million quality inspections it conducts annually in North America.

February 23, 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.

Previous
Next

Primary Sidebar

Footer

  • About
  • Sponsor the Spoon
  • The Spoon Events
  • Spoon Plus

© 2016–2025 The Spoon. All rights reserved.

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
 

Loading Comments...