Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Smart Garden

Scoop: Kalanick’s Latest Idea for Disrupting Food May Be No-Fee Bulk Food Delivery & Automated Pick-Up Kiosks

When Travis Kalanick showed up at the Food on Demand conference this past May, technology and restaurant industry insiders could hardly believe it.

After all, the Uber cofounder had gained an almost Howard Hughes-like reputation for secrecy over the past decade, saying nary a word publicly over the years while journalists and Internet sleuths searched for digital breadcrumbs about what exactly he was up to with CloudKitchens, a business under which he had quietly built the biggest network of dark kitchen/ghost kitchen facilities in the country.

But unlike the eccentric aerospace and film magnate who spent his days toggling between locking himself away in screening rooms and crashing planes, Kalanick made clear on stage in Las Vegas last month that he’s been busy building a new business empire focused on reimagining the world of restaurants and food delivery.

“Can you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car?” he asked. From there, Kalanick painted a vision of how the companies he’d assembled under his City Storage Systems holding company would do things differently. He suggested the sum total of his collected companies – such as shared/dark kitchens (CloudKitchens), Point of Sale software (Otter), and restaurant automation (Lab37) – could power a more efficient way of doing business than the disjointed, expensive, and fee-ridden state the restaurant and food delivery business had evolved into over the past decade.

It was during his talk that Kalanick talked up the idea of an ‘Intenet Food Court,’ where customers could get a hyper-personalized experience and order any type of food within 15 minutes. To realize that vision, Kalanick said food production and logistics would need to be automated, and his company was building the necessary infrastructure under City Storage Systems to deliver that.

“We paint where this all goes, but there’s a road to get there and we call it infrastructure for better food,” he continued. “That’s the mission of my company.”

Kalanick’s refererence to the concept of an Internet or digital food court was not the first signal from him or his company about the concept. In fact, in 2020, the company launched what it described as an Internet food court in the LA market, where it would aggregate all the food operators in the Koreatown facility and offer multi-tenant ordering. They even had a website URL, Internetfoodcourt.co. However, as of April 2020, the site had gone dead, and CloudKitchens had scrubbed its Internet presence of the term.

But then, in March of this year, the company started talking digital food courts again. That month, it posted a story on its blog about the launch of a Picnic-branded digital food court platform in Chicago. The location, which was formerly called Avondale Food Pickup before it was renamed Picnic, featured what the post described as a new digital platform that would enable a customer to order food on a new website (picnicfood.com) or in person via a kiosk or a human worker and then they would be able to pick up the food via a pick-up locker.

The pickup kiosk can be seen below:

The website for this Picnic shows you can ask for delivery or pickup, and currently the only location for pickup is the Chicago address in Avondale, and a Google search seems to indicate this was the first and only time Kalanick’s company had used the Picnic branding and the concept of a digital food hall since 2020.

And then earlier this week, what appears to be another version of the same Picnic company (same logo, different website) showed up on Linkedin and talked up a new platform concept in the Los Angeles market. The pitch? A ‘digital food hall’ and fee-free multi-brand delivery of food to different places of business or residential multi-family units. The concept, which is explained in the video below, is essentially bulk orders to various office buildings, schools, or wherever hungry people convene together each day.

According to the explainer video and the website, a Picnic “activation” starts with a location manager or employee/resident applying to be a Picnic delivery location. Once accepted, Picnic will put what it describes as a Picnic “shelf” at the location where the different individual meals are placed during a delivery.

This new Picnic doesn’t state anywhere on its website or on Linkedin that it’s a part of City Storage Systems’ network. The website‘s FAQ describes the company as a product of coworkers in the California market “who realized that it’s nearly impossible to find consistent lunch options that have variety,” and when The Spoon reached someone via a number found on the company’s Linkedin page, the person told us the company was not associated with CloudKitchens or City Storage Systems.

But we are confident it is for a couple of obvious reasons: Not only does it use the same logo as the CloudKitchens Picnic offering in Chicago, but the location’s address at 777 S Figueroa in Los Angeles is listed in multiple locations as being the same address as City Storage Systems.

Which, of course, raises all sorts of questions. For example, is this version of Picnic – a platform for bulk-ordered delivery of food to places of work and multi-family living – going to be the next big idea from Kalanick’s company? And does this mean the company is building out its own delivery network? And will Kalanick & Co roll out the digital food court and automated pick-up kiosks (such as that in Picnic Chicago) to its other ghost kitchen locations across the country?

A new delivery network would certainly be an interesting move for a founder who is largely responsible for not only reshaping personalized transportation with Uber and building the infrastructure for one of the biggest third party meal delivery companies in UberEats.

Finally, it also needs to be asked: Why Picnic? There are already a couple other Picnics in the food tech space, including Picnic in Seattle which makes pizza robots, and the grocery tech startup named Picnic out of The Netherlands. It seems like a curious move, especially since the US Trademark office awarded a trademark to the Seattle-based Picnic (their corporate name is Picnic Works) to use the term Picnic.

If you have any insights or leads on what else City Storage Systems is planning to do with its Picnic platform (either the centralized pickup Internet food hall concept or the bulk-delivery concept), drop us a line.

Gardyn Hopes to Grow Even Greener with New Investment

This week, JAB Ventures, an investment firm with stakes in consumers brands such as Keurig Dr. Pepper, Peet’s coffee, Pret A Manger, and others in the food and beverage space, announced a $5 million investment in Gardyn, bringing the company’s capital raise this year to $15 million.

With the expanding global focus on healthy eating, climate change, and sustainable resources, companies such as Gardyn, which entered the market in 2020, are hoping to level the playing field in the home gardening space. The goal for players looking to make successful inroads into this consumer space is by offering scalable products with appeal to black and green thumbs alike. Those ahead of the pack have harnessed and simplified technologies, such as AI, to provide choice and convenience, resulting in ongoing yields of chemical-free fruits and vegetables.

“Gardyn, built on remarkable technology and a radically novel customer experience, is shaping the future of food at home,” said Joachim Creus, Senior Partner at JAB, in a company press release. “Gardyn is the clear leader in the fast-growing segment of homegrown food, as evidenced by the brand’s strong growth and high adoption and retention rates, even beyond COVID. JAB Ventures is proud to support Gardyn’s development and bring to market credible alternatives to the industrial paradigm of the past, in a way that is better for the planet, better for health, and brings natural art to your home.”

In a phone interview with The Spoon, FX Rouxel, founder and CEO of Gardyn, describes his company’s approach to the home produce-growing world as “hybrid-ponics,” which takes advantage of the tried-and-tested hydroponics approach to gardening with an overlay of Artificial Intelligence. The result for Gardyn is a vertical tower that takes up a small space making it suitable for even small spaces in apartments. Even though it offers a small footprint, Rouxel explains Gardyn offers a large yield. That abundance is governed by technology that provides a continuous supply of healthy greens, vegetables, fruits, and even flowers. The constant supply is critical as fresh produce—especially plants grown without pesticides– is highly perishable.

“Our vision is simple,” Rouxel says. “We want to control such elements as time, pest problems, germinating seeds, and efficiently using such resources as energy and water while creating a beautiful piece of natural gardening.”

Elements such as water and light are controlled using AI and a “Kelby” technology, which is billed as a gardening assistant. Kelby keeps an eye on the individual seed containers called yPods to ensure they are experiencing optimal growing conditions. At this point, Gardyn has 750 seed varieties.

Rouxel says that the JAB investment will partially support future growth in such areas as AI. As indoor home gardeners evolve from using company-supplied yPod seed packets to experimenting with their own seed choices, tweaks to the AI will be needed to recognize these independent plantings and determine the best growing conditions. The financing also will be used to continue to grow the Gardyn community which is an essential part of the company’s popularity. The community is a vital source for individual Gardyn-ers to share growing tips and healthy recipes, particularly for those more exotics greens and veggies.

Gardyn is one of a growing cohort of companies in the indoor gardening segment. Other players include AeroGarden (owned by Scotts Miracle-Gro), The Smart Garden, Rise Garden, Lettuce Grow The Farmstand, Tower Garden FLEX, and other niche products. While indoor gardening isn’t likely to be a zero-sum game, a handful will survive based on price, ease of use, scalability (in both add-ons and seed varieties), and channel partners in the next few years.

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.”  

FirstBuild is Making a Smart Mushroom Fruiting Chamber for the Home

One of my wife and I’s inside jokes is the reason we fell in love was our mutual dislike of mushrooms. When we first met, we both thought most forms of fungi that crossed our plates were gross. A few gray hairs (on my head, not hers) and years of marriage later, we can both be adult enough nowadays to eat the occasional mushroom when offered, even if we both would still prefer to hold the mold.

That said, I have come to marvel at the power of fungi in recent years and am all for people (except me) eating more mushrooms, so I was excited when I saw that FirstBuild is working on taking its mushroom fruiting chamber from prototype to product.

You can catch a glimpse of the new Mella Smart Mushroom Fruiting Chamber in action below in the video from FirstBuild.

Introducing Mella: The Smart Mushroom Fruiting Chamber

With sensors for humidity and temperature monitoring, the ability to monitor the mushrooms via a web dashboard and email alerts, closed-loop humidity control with a small refillable water basin, and air filter with duel inlet fans, the appliance has all the bells and whistles to help the aspiring fungiculurist create a high-tech fruiting chamber on their kitchen countertop. Plus it looks cool. The fruiting chamber is surrounded by glass, which lets you check out the your growing fungi.

So why is FirstBuild creating a mushroom growing appliance? The main reason is probably because weird and interesting new appliance concepts are largely the reason the organization exists. FirstBuild, which became somewhat well known with product concepts like its precision cooking Paragon cooktop and Opal ice maker, essentially acts as a product innovation engine for GE Appliances. The group crowdsources new ideas, builds prototypes, and occasionally – like with the Opal – will take the prototypes to full production.

FirstBuild has a microfactory that can do small batch manufacturing, so oftentimes the group will make small one-off manufacturing runs of products like the Forge clear ice system. Other times, the product never gets out of prototype, like it looks like happened with the Arden in-home smoker (bummer) or the Saucemaster 3000.

The move into a grow system for mushrooms isn’t the only sign that FirstBuild has become home-grow curious since earlier this year the company prototyped a smart garden system. It’s also possibly a sign the innovation group is following its parent company’s lead in exploring home grow systems as part of a broader home appliance offering.

If you want to get in on the mushrooom farming fun, stay tuned. FirstBuild says the campaign (which we presume will be on Indieogo) is coming soon.

Click & Grow’s Tabletop Smart Garden Is Insanely Popular on Kickstarter Right Now

It says something about the popularity of at-home indoor farms when a Kickstarter campaign for one meets its funding goal in 20 minutes. 

Such was the case recently with Click & Grow, an Estonian-born startup that cites NASA as the chief inspiration behind its smart garden systems. Click & Grow was one of the original wave of companies bringing the concept of at-home indoor farming to the masses. Thanks to the pandemic, food supply chain disruptions, and general concerns about health and wellness, the idea of growing produce on your own countertop has only become bigger over the last year or so.

Hence the company’s Kickstarter campaign for its Click & Grow 25 device reaching its $35,000 goal so darn quickly when it launched a few days ago.

The Click & Grow 25 is a tabletop farm that, in the company’s own words, “works like a Nespresso coffee machine, only instead of coffee pods, you use biodegradable Smart Soil plant pods to grow fresh greens all year round.” The Smart Soil is one of Click & Grow’s claims to fame. It’s a plant-based growth substrate that was developed in-house. When placed in pods that are then inserted into the garden, the Smart Soil releases a mixture of nutrients, oxygen, and water, with levels of each calculated for the specific seed type in each pod.

An accompanying mobile app provides timelines and grow tips for each plant, along with reminders and the ability to control the lighting settings on the actual device. It also offers recipe suggestions.

The device also features removable trays, so that one can be removed at harvest time and replaced with another full of fresh seeds, keeping the grow cycle constant. As of now, it can grow 25 plants simultaneously per module. Since the device is modular, grow units can be added based on the number of people in a household. Click & Grow recommends one unit for a single-person household, one to two for a couple, and two to three and above for families.

The campaign has already nabbed over $360,000 and has 22 days left. Those that pledge $499 or more get one Click & Grow 25 device that includes a three-month supply of grow pods. That’s a substantially lower price point than the $799 estimated retail price the device will carry when it is officially launched.

Click & Grow says devices will ship in February of 2022.  

  

Meet HECTAR, an Open-Source Project for At-Home Vertical Farming

When it comes to at-home vertical farming, who will be first to grow a watermelon?

That’s a question posed by HECTAR Hydroponics, a project that wants to open-source the at-home vertical farm concept. Rather than mass-producing a whole farm and selling it to consumers, the project’s creators have instead made a manual and documentation available for free download, so that any DIY enthusiast can build their very own HECTAR.

Felix Wieberneit of the Royal College of Art and the Imperial College of London conceptualized HECTAR, which eventually became part of Imperial College’s Venture Catalyst accelerator program, a competition for entrepreneurs sponsored by Huawei. The HECTAR vertical farm is the size of a regular bookshelf and can grow up to 128 plants, according to the project’s website. So far, users have grown kale, spinach, and other leafy greens, as well as green beans.

According to the publication Springwise, HECTAR was partly inspired by what Wieberneit saw as a need for more affordability and versatility with at-home vertical farming: “Wieberneit wants to change the market for hydroponic systems from ‘overpriced smart planters and costly seed subscriptions’, to systems that people design to meet their own needs, which use local materials.” 

Thus far, most large-scale vertical farming companies use either proprietary tech developed in-house or a proprietary mix of off-the-shelf technologies. Information on what works and what doesn’t in terms of the technology is few and far between right now, a situation that also applies to at-home versions of vertical farms.

Hence, Hectar. The plans, released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, include a step-by-step guide, an instructional video, and a list of materials, all of which can be purchased from the average hardware store.

A few questions come to mind when thinking of HECTAR in the larger context of at-home vertical farming. For instance, how much does it cost? Do all the materials listed add up to something cheaper than, say, a complete farm from Rise Gardens ($549+) or Gardyn? ($899 for a starter kit). What will the quality of the produce be like compared to those or even compared to what you could buy at the store? 

Those questions will no doubt be answered in time on the project’s community forum, where growers can share tips and advice as well as any improvements and/or changes made to the design. No one’s reported any watermelons yet, but open-sourcing the vertical farming concept might just be the way to get there.

Natufia Labs Raises $3.5M for its Indoor Garden Appliance, Relocates to Saudi Arabia

Natufia Labs, the Estonia-based automated kitchen garden startup, announced today that it is relocating to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). KAUST is also leading a $3.5 million investment round in Natufia, awarding $2 million through the KAUST Innovation Fund. This brings the total amount of money raised by Natufia to $4.7 million.

Natufia makes an automated home gardening appliance about the size of refrigerator that automatically controls elements such as lighting, as well as water and nutrient dispensing. The $13,000 Natufia cabinet uses seedpods that are placed in a special unit to germinate before being transferred to pots to grow and be harvested. Right now, Natufia’s appliance can grow leafy greens, herbs and flowers.

In a press announcement sent to The Spoon, Natufia Labs CEO and Founder Gregory Lu said, “From Estonian icy-snow winters to the arid climate of Saudi Arabia, sustainable access to food supply is a global issue, so it is more than natural that this technology is thriving from Saudi Arabia.”

Problems with our existing food supply chain were revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic last year, causing a surge of interest in consumer indoor agriculture products. A new wave of high-tech appliances automate all the “hard” parts about growing food, allowing people to more easily grow and control their own food supply. Other players in the space including Gardyn, AeroGrow and Click & Grow have all seen demand increase during the pandemic.

With its new funding, Natufia said it will accelerate the development of its next models, hopefully bringing the price down to something more affordable for even more people.


Rise Gardens Launches a Countertop Version of Its At-Home Smart Growing System

Rise Gardens is best known for its indoor smart farms that are geared towards the average consumer and roughly the size of your average bookshelf. But those living in small spaces may not be able to easily accommodate another piece of furniture, and with that in mind, Rise released a countertop version of its farm this week. According to a LinkedIn post from the company, the device, dubbed The Personal Rise Garden, can grow “8+ plants at any given time” that can be harvested in “as little as 25 days.”

The Personal device is essentially a smaller version of Rise’s flagship product, a multi-shelf smart garden that uses nutrient-enriched water and a “recipe” of LED lighting to hydroponically grow leafy greens and herbs. An accompanying smartphone app does the bulk of the work in terms of calculating the temperature of the garden, determining nutrition and pH levels, and telling the user when it’s time to water the plants. Users can purchase a subscription service that automatically mails growing supplies on a regular basis. They can also use their own plant seeds if they prefer not to be locked into a subscription. 

Speaking to The Spoon earlier this year, Rise Gardens’ Head of Product and Strategy, Diego Blondet, said he believed automated indoor farming would make its way into most kitchen designs in the future. But we’re still years away from having a smart farm built into the cabinetry like a microwave, and in the meantime, many would-be users live in small apartments that can’t accommodate farms the size of furniture.

Hence Rise’s move to release a countertop version of its smart garden. The new device clocks in at 18 x 11 x 16 inches and weights 20 pounds. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, it can grow four large plants (tomatoes, peppers, kale, etc.), eight medium-sized plants (herbs), or 12 small plants (chives, lavender). Cost-wise, the farm will run you $279, which is on par with other countertop growing devices, including those from Aspara ($259) and AVA’s Byte Smart Garden ($349).

Notably, Rise received an investment from the Amazon Alexa Fund last month to “fuel new products, accessories, and further R+D.” At the time of the announcement, Rise CEO and founder Hank Adams hinted at an Alexa integration for his company’s devices, which means voice tech might be coming to smart farms soon, with Rise leading the way. The company also recently expanded distribution to Canada, according to a Rise spokesperson.

Offering a smaller version of its standard product could also connect Rise Gardens to a potentially different audience, which is those who are new to the at-home smart farming concept and may not want to commit $500 or more to learning about it. From the looks of it, the Personal device won’t feed an entire family, but could be sufficient for one- and two-person households. I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve purchased mine.

Amazon’s Alexa Fund Invests in At-Home Vertical Farming Company Rise Gardens

Rise Gardens announced today it has received an investment from the Amazon Alexa Fund that builds upon a $2.6M seed round Rise closed in May. The amount invested by the Amazon Alexa Fund was not disclosed.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the deal is both a collaboration and a cash investment that will “fuel new products, accessories and further R+D” for Rise Gardens.

The Chicago-based Rise is best known for its standalone console (roughly the size of a standard bookcase) that contains a hydroponic grow system for consumers at home. The system does most of the hard work—calculating nutrition and pH levels, knowing when and how much to water the plants—for the user, whom it notifies via a corresponding app.

Rise’s system is also modular, so it can be added to or subtracted from over time depending on how many greens your household consumes each week. Users can also grow beets and tomatoes in addition to leafy greens and herbs.

Rise raised $2.6 million in seed funding earlier this year; Amazon’s new investment is an extension of this seed funding, according to today’s press release.

Amazon’s investment in Rise sounds promising, not just for the company but for the entire vertical farming sector. To start, Rise CEO and founder Hank Adams hinted today at Alexa functionality for the Rise system: “Collaborating with the Alexa Fund will better enable us to integrate our smart, connected garden with Alexa, making indoor gardening even easier. We are also excited about the opportunity to work with Amazon to evolve and expand how we reach consumers with our device and consumables business concept,” he said. The details of that Alexa integration are scant as of now, but one imagines being able to ask Alexa about your plant’s pH levels or tell the speaker to adjust the light mixture. On the flip, Rise could notify users via Alexa when it’s time to water the plants.

There’s no question that consumer-grade vertical farms are still a pretty niche product right now, since many of them cost more than the average person can easily afford. (Rise’s single unit console starts at $549.) But the pandemic and accompanying disruptions to the food supply chain have undoubtedly increased folks’ desire to control more of what they eat, which has led to an influx of new devices. From Gardyn’s stylish take on at-home farming to consumer electronics companies like LG building them into the kitchen, vertical farming is definitely making its way into the home. 

Amazon, of course, wants to control your entire home, including your kitchen, so it’s not surprising the Seattle tech giant would partner making at-home vertical farming products. As well, the company has made forays into the gardening space before, like this patent from 2017. Amazon knowing what types of plants you are growing can fuel its selling machine to recommend recipes and other groceries.

Like it or not, Amazon’s moves in food tech tend to influence others, which means the collaborations and products that come out of the Rise partnership will influence the future of at-home vertical farming for everyone. 

Plenty and Driscoll’s Partner to Grow Strawberries Indoors

San Francisco Bay Area-based vertical farming startup Plenty and well-known berry brand Driscoll’s announced a partnership today to grow strawberries year-round via controlled-environment indoor farms. The partnership will use Plenty’s indoor farming technology and incorporate Driscoll’s proprietary genetics for strawberries, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

Plenty hinted at strawberries (and tomatoes) more than a year ago, when it unveiled its high-tech vertical farm Tigris. Currently, the company is best known for its mixtures of leafy greens, which it grows indoors via the hydronponic method. Plenty’s facilities also utilize sensors, LED light mixtures, and temperature and air control to create the optimal growing environment for plants.

Leafy greens are still one of the most common crops grown in these controlled-environment farms, and for a few of good reasons. For one thing, they’re one of the most popular produce types among U.S. consumers today. They are also far more delicate than, say, a mango, making it harder to transport them without spoilage. Leafy greens also yield more crop in a smaller space compared to something like a row of sweetcorn, and they can be harvested faster. Something like a strawberry takes more time to grow, and one profile of Plenty last year noted that it can take up to nine months to understand how a strawberry plant performs inside a controlled environment operation.

Lately, though, more ag tech companies have announced plans to grow more than arugula and herbs. Most notably, a Singapore-based company called SinGrow has employed its proprietary vertical farming tech to grow strawberries on a rack designed specifically for that fruit. SinGrow also creates its own strawberry breeds. Unfold, which just raised $30 million, has added cucumbers and tomatoes to its roster. Plenty itself said at the time of the Tigris launch that it wants to grow “exotic” fruits and vegetables, though as yet the company hasn’t named specific crops.

Strawberries aren’t exactly exotic, but for vertical farming, they are a logical next crop after leafy greens. Plenty’s home state of California produces over 91 percent of the country’s entire strawberry supply, and that fruit is also high on U.S. consumers’ lists.

To start, Driscoll’s will grow strawberries at Plenty’s Laramie, Wyoming facility. Driscoll’s Chairman and CEO J. Miles Reiter said in today’s press release that this partnership “will create a competitive market edge.” While that remains to be seen, one thing we can expect with a fair amount of certainty is that more companies will be growing strawberries via controlled environments in the months to come. 

Gardyn Aims to Make At-Home Vertical Farming Small, Simple, and Stylish

Thanks to disruptions in the food supply chain, panic-buying sprees, and the general uncertainty of the times, growing food at home seems like a pretty good idea of late. Trouble is, many consumers don’t have the know-how to cultivate their own leafy greens and other produce in the backyard. Even those who do often lack adequate space.

A company called Gardyn is addressing both of those issues with an at-home vertical farming system that requires minimal input from the user and can easily fit inside a small apartment if need be. The idea, as Gardyn founder and CEO FX Rouxel explained to me over the phone last week, is to make growing food in one’s own home as simple and straightforward as possible. To do that, the company has built a farm that relies on AI to do much of the heavy lifting in terms of monitoring and maintaining an edible crop of food. Or as Rouxel said, “The system is managing everything for you.”

Gardyn’s system is made up of two parts: a compact vertical tower, which can grow as many as 30 plants, and an accompanying app powered by an AI assistant named “Kelby.” Users only have to order seeds and “plug” the seed pods into the vertical towers. The system automatically circulates water and nutrients to the plants, while Kelby monitors plant growth and sends reminders when it’s time to add water to the garden or harvest the plants. 

Right now, available crops from Gardyn’s site include mostly leafy greens and herbs, some flowers, cherry tomatoes, and jalapeños. Customers can also use their own seeds if preferred.

The system uses what Rouxel calls “a hybrid of different hydroponic technologies,” including the deep water method and aeroponics. (The company brands its approach as “hybriponics.”) By themselves, these different methods have certain limitations in the at-home setting. Deep water, where plant roots are fully submerged in nutrient-enriched water, requires a lot of space. Aeroponics is a great setup for outdoors, but once indoors it requires lighting, which gets expensive very quickly. Gardyn pulled elements from both to create a system that takes up only two square feet of space and doesn’t require any extra hardware. “Within just two square feet, you can produce a lot of food,” says Rouxel, adding that Gardyn’s units have produced “over 25,000 pounds of produce” during the last few months.

That quest to grow a lot of leafy greens in a small amount of space is an area with plenty of competition these days. Farmshelf recently unveiled its first-ever farm for the home, and companies like Rise Gardens and Agrilution (the latter recently bought by Miele) also offer promising solutions for the consumer space.

And while historically, investment in vertical farming has mainly gone towards the industrial-scale indoor farms (think AeroFarms), at-home farms are fast becoming a lucrative area. Investors, Rouxel explained to me, see traditional agriculture as a risky business that’s less insurable because its success is in part dependent on the weather outside. With climate change triggering more extreme weather, investors will look more and more to alternative solutions in controlled-environment agriculture.

“I am absolutely convinced we are going to see in the coming two years a total disruption in the way we grow things,” he says. Chiefly, that will be growing the food in much closer proximity to consumers, whether through at-home systems like Gardyn’s, in-store farms at grocery retailers, rooftop gardens, and high-tech greenhouses. “In future we’re going to have a spectrum of solutions,” Rouxel noted.

Getting these vertical farms closer to consumers and in their own homes will require bringing the price of the machines down. At the moment, Gardyn’s system is roughly on par pricewise with other systems out there that can realistically feed a family of four: $799 for the base model all the way up to $1485 for the “Plus” model.

Rouxel is aware that the cost is still too high for many consumers. “We don’t want this to be only for well-off people,” he told me. “It’s important that we find ways that anyone can afford this.”

Many companies, including Gardyn, offer financing options on their farms now. And more investment dollars going into the space in the future could mean companies have the time and space to innovate on ways to make their system cheaper for the average consumer.

While pricing remains a question, one thing that’s certain is that at-home vertical farming is on the path to becoming a regular part of the kitchen, rather than just a trend. “What we want is to develop solutions that will quickly change the way people access food,” said Rouxel. “We won’t solve everything, that’s for sure, but we want to be part of the solution for how we shape food.”

Aspara’s High-Tech At-Home Farm Launches in the U.S.

Hong Kong-based Aspara, which makes high-tech, tabletop-sized farming units for homes, is now shipping devices across the U.S. through retailers like Home Depot, Wayfair, and via its own website.

The Spoon flagged Aspara back in January as a company to watch in the up-and-coming at-home farming space because of the device’s small size, lowish price point, and approach to hydroponics. At the time, the company was selling its system, which can fit easily on a countertop, to customers in Hong Kong and in very, very limited quantities via Amazon to other parts of the world.

This official U.S. launch makes the device available to all U.S. consumers. Speaking on the phone today, Rob Alexander, the Owner of Conducted Sales, the sales agent for Aspara in North American markets, said that Aspara has another eight retailers in the works, though he couldn’t at this point use specific names. 

High-tech, hydroponic farms have historically been the territory of industrial-scale indoor farming companies — the AeroFarms and Plentys of the world. But following this past January’s CES show, both major appliance makers like LG and Miele along with smaller startups began to heavily publicize a new kind of indoor farm, one created for the at-home consumer. These devices are typically quite small and meant to feed a single household, rather than supply a grocery retailer. 

Alexander said Aspara’s homegrown system differs from others on the market in the way it tackles the hydroponic element of the farming. It uses what he calls an “ebb and flow” design, where water for the plant roots is constantly replenished from the side unit (see image above), making the water supply easier to refill than many at-home farms. Aspara’s also has sensors that determine nutrient levels in the water, the current level of humidity in the air, and whether a plant is getting too much light. An accompanying app notifies the user when any of these elements need attention.

“It’s trying to give you feedback to create the optimum growing environment,” Alexander said.

Another differentiation: the device is repairable. While that might first sound like a weird selling point (no one wants to buy tech that might break), it actually speaks to how seriously Aspara is pursuing the idea of making its high-tech grow system the kind of kitchen appliance that’s on par with a dishwasher or refrigerator. You don’t throw out a dishwater the second something goes wrong. In the same way, Aspara users can replace parts like sensors and light canopies, rather than having to go out and buy a whole new farm.

The company’s approach recently won them the Green Product Audience Award. 

Price-wise, Aspara is on the lower end of the at-home farming spectrum. The device goes for $349 right now at Home Depot online.

Of course these days you can’t have a conversation about at-home food production without brining COVID-19 up. Since Apsara wasn’t available to North Americans at the height of shelter-in-place mandates, the company wasn’t measuring demand for its product in that region. However, Alexander told me they did see a spike in Hong Kong, where the device has been available for some time. 

My guess is that with the product available Stateside, that demand will surface quickly. Other at-home farming systems have seen huge jumps in demand recently as the pandemic, panic-buying sprees, and other factors have made many consumers question their total reliance on the traditional food supply chain.

Next up, Aspara wants to do a widespread launch in Canada, and also broaden the types of plants its system can grow to include other types of plants, including fruits and vegetables.