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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Smart Garden

What’s Next for Vertical Farming? Proprietary Strawberries and Other Non-Leafy Produce

Agtech investment firm AgFunder announced this week that it has added agtech company SinGrow to its investment portfolio for an undisclosed sum. AgFunder founding partner Michael Dean wrote in a post that SinGrow “isn’t just looking to be another vertical farmer selling leafy greens.” Instead, the company uses a combination of plant biology, hydroponic vertical farming, and other technologies to grow what it hopes will be a range of produce types, starting with its own novel varieties of strawberries. 

As Dean lays out in his post, SinGrow has developed a vertical farming solution that addresses every stage of a plant’s agricultural journey, from breeding to harvesting. (Most vertical farm solutions do not address plant breeding.) It breeds strawberry varieties adapted to humid weather, and has two proprietary strawberry cultivators specifically developed for Singapore’s tropical climate. Both of those things mean SinGrow’s system uses less energy because it needs less air conditioning pumped in to cool the facility and reach the ideal growing temperature for the strawberries.

The company also grows the plants on a strawberry-specific rack it has developed, where the plants grow outward instead of upward. That in turn allows a harvesting robot to to drive alongside the rack and simply snip the strawberries off rather than pick them. 

Why strawberries? Well, first, they’ve been a hobby of SinGrow cofounder Bao Shengjie, who has been cross-breeding strawberry seeds since 2016. That particular fruit was of interest to the founders because it’s difficult to actually get in Singapore, at least at an affordable price point. SinGrow lists expense, poor taste, and an unstable supply chain as reasons strawberries are difficult for the average consumer to buy in that region.

The company has this neat explainer video that delves more into the specifics on how it grows its strawberries.

Singapore also relies on imports for about 90 percent of its foods, hence the Singaporean government’s 30x30 initiative launched in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: Singapore should have 30 percent of its foods produced domestically by 2030. 

On that note, SinGrow hopes to soon move beyond strawberries to grow grapes, saffron, and other crops, according to Dean’s post.

A (very small) handful of companies are also exploring what else they can grow beyond the leafy green. UK-based Phytoponics is trialing a system for plants like cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers. And a while back, San Francisco startup Plenty said it wanted to grow “exotic” produce on its farm Tigris. To date, though, the company’s website still offers only leafy green varieties.

If a company like SinGrow can show others how to use biology, technology, and farming to grow a greater assortment of produce items, it could change vertical farming’s role in our system from an add-on method to a primary source for getting certain fruits and vegetables. It’s early days yet, but the technology looks to be moving in that direction. 

GrowSquares Will Personalize Your Garden With Data Science, Microbiology, Feathers

“High-tech gardening” usually brings to mind the automated indoor vertical farming devices everyone from startups to major appliance makers are pushing these days. Those are great for time-strapped folks or those who tend to just kill plants. But for people who want to keep their hands in the soil, technology in the smart garden will need to play a different role — that of assisting the human rather than automating their entire process.

NYC-based GrowSquares has found a way to leave the human element in the gardening process while still taking advantage of tech to improve the grow process. 

“We’re the opposite of automated gardening,” GrowSquares CEO Zachary Witman said over the phone last week.

The company uses data science (advanced LIDAR and location data) as well as microbiology to determine the best plants for a specific user’s space as well as the most optimal elements to include in the soil. An accompanying app then helps the user monitor the plants, though watering and feeding them are still manual tasks.

“We look at sun, wind, taxonomy of the soil. We capture those things and then using a lot of data science we create a microenvironmental profile and say, ‘Based upon this, the attributes of your space, (time of year, etc.) these are the plants that will grow best,'” Witman explained.

Users see a scoring system where plants are rated Optimal, Good, Fair, and Poor based on location data. For example, in Nashville, TN, Basil grown at my address gets a score of 93 for this time of year, which means it’s an optimal plant for growing right now. Spinach, on the other hand, just scores 51, making it a bad fit for my backyard at the moment.

The system can actually get even more granular in terms of a users’s location than just their city. Using a customer’s geo-coordinates, the company then uses data science and machine learning models to determine which plants are best for that particular user’s garden. The recommendations may or may not be the same as the person two doors down.

“We break down each individual client’s soil. Fidelity of our data showcases the difference between you and your neighbor.”

Once a user has purchased the right plants, GrowSquares sends the necessary seeds along with optimal spacing and depth and a soil formulation for your individual garden. That might include green sand, coconut husks, feather, alfalfa, or other elements the company uses to formulate soil. Meanwhile, the app also sends notifications for when it’s time to water the plants and time to harvest them.

The actual squares in which the plants grow are made of palm leaf that naturally decomposes over time. Since it’s a modular system, users can add more squares over time, and the squares can be configured to fit different environments, balconies, backyards, and rooftops among them. Since the squares decompose, they actually replenish the soil. 

Like other consumer-grade smart garden companies, GrowSquares has seen an uptick in sales thanks to the pandemic. Witman told me the company started out servicing just three cities, Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles. Because of COVID-19, demand spiked and GrowSquares went national — a decision that’s temporary stressed the supply chain. Right now, new users must reserve their GrowSquares and wait, though Witman told me it would not be too long before things return to normal. 

He was also cautious to attribute too much of the product’s popularity to the pandemic. “I think everybody has their own reason for why they want to garden,” he said. The pandemic is one, but so is a desire to eat locally or the wish to avoid industrial-scale farming companies. And for some, going out to the balcony or backyard to grab some herbs is just easier than ordering them via Whole Foods or going to the store.

Rise Gardens Raises $2.6M in Fresh Funding for Its At-Home Hydroponics Platform

Chicago-based startup Rise Gardens has raised $2.6 million in seed funding for its indoor grow system, according to TechCrunch. The round was led by True Ventures. 

Rise is one of a growing number of companies making self-contained indoor farms designed not for mass production of leafy greens, but for the average person’s home or apartment. The hardware-software system looks like a piece of furniture, requires minimal setup by the user, and is controlled via a smartphone app. In theory, at least, that means you don’t need a degree in agricultural studies or even a good track record with gardening to grow herbs and lettuces for your own personal meals.

That’s where the Rise Gardens app comes into play. When we spoke in January of this year, Rise’s Head of Product and Strategy, Diego Blondet, explained how the app automates tasks in the growing process a farmer would normally do, such as calculating the temperature of the farm, determining nutrition and pH levels, and figuring out when to water. Rise’s app works with a sensor that automates those calculations and notifies users when it’s time to water or feed their plants.

Blondet also said he believes automated indoor farming will make its way into the design of most kitchens at some point in the future. In fact, that’s already happening, with 2020 so far being a year when startups and large appliance-makers alike have unveiled indoor farming devices designed for the average home. Seedo, Verdeat, the Planty Cube, LG, and GE are all on that list. 

As The Spoon’s Publisher Michael Wolf pointed out not long ago, the COVID-19 pandemic could accelerate average folks’ adoption of indoor farming. The recent panic buying spree reminded us that grocery store supplies aren’t infinite, and that there are glaring issues with our current food supply chain. As Mike said:

“As the coronavirus has forced all of us to think more about our food supply, some consumers have gone beyond just buying a little extra food to store away. Now they are thinking about how we could ensure access to food independent of breakdowns in the system.”

Rise Gardens’ founder Hank Adams told TechCrunch that since shelter-in-place orders landed in the U.S., the company has seen a 750 percent increase in sales. 

Heads of lettuce won’t feed a family of four, of course, but according to Adams, Rise looks at itself as more of a supplement to your weekly groceries, rather than a replacement. Which is, frankly, one of the more honest takes on indoor vertical farming, an industry that’s often been praised as being the future of agriculture but still can’t grow a root vegetable. 

Since leafy greens are difficult to ship because of their delicate nature, they’re an obvious area for vertical farming to target. Few at-home systems currently allow for the volume of greens the average family, or even the average person, would need in a given week. Since Rise’s system is a little bigger as well as modular (you can add shelves to it over time), it could provide a good blueprint for what at-home vertical farms should look like when they start to become the norm in kitchen design.

Pico, the Mini Indoor Garden that Can Grow Herbs and Tomatoes, Busts Through Kickstarter Goal

With quarantine keeping us all at home, people are growing plants both for mental health and as a food source. But even if the enthusiasm is there, there are still plenty of pitfalls to accidentally kill your plant friends — overwatering, underwatering, not enough light, etc.

For those reasons, plus a growing (ha!) interest in food sovereignty, coronavirus could actually present a real market opportunity for smart gardens; automated indoor grow systems to manage the health of your plants. But, as Mike Wolf noted in his piece last month, one big hurdle standing in smart gardens’ way is their cost. The systems can range in price from hundreds to even thousands of dollars.

That’s where Pico, a new automated indoor garden currently making a splash on Kickstarter, could really distinguish itself. Early Backers can secure a Pico for only $32. The intended MSRP is $45.

When we say Pico made a splash on Kickstarter, we’re not exaggerating: at the time of writing the company has raised $1.3 million on Kickstarter (its initial goal was $10,000). The small self-contained grow system that can be affixed to walls and features an LED light mounted on an adjustable arm, which can be moved up as plants grow. It can also self-water, provided someone fills up its tank once a week.

Like most indoor garden systems, Pico is limited in terms of what plants can grow. The Kickstarter says it can be used for decorative plants, like succulents, as well as to grow herbs and leafy greens. It even claims it can grow cherry tomatoes and chili peppers, though its small size could limit the amount.

Photo: Pico’s grow system, by Altifarm

Pico may be extremely affordable, but it doesn’t have quite the same stramlined user experience as some of the pricier home gardens. For one, Pico has to be plugged in to work. It’s powered with a USB Type-C cable, so it can plug into a phone or computer charger. Pico comes with a 3-meter long cable with magnetic organizer loops to more easily route around kitchen appliances, so that helps. But it still seems like kind of a pain to set up. That said, Pico is small enough to fit pretty much anywhere, and can also be mounted on walls to position it closer to a wall outlet. You can also connect three Picos together at a time and power them with the same charging cable.

The Pico price only includes the device. Users have to add in their own soil and seeds. To be fair, that’s not a huge lift, but it does mean the Pico isn’t a straight plug-and-grow option, like Aerofarm or Click & Grow.

It also isn’t 100 percent automated. Users have to manually turn the LED light on and off to imitate the rise and fall of the sun. They can also purchase a timer to automate the process for an additional cost.

Altifarm, the company behind Pico, has some experience making automated grow systems. They’ve already launched Herbstation, an indoor farm that was also funded by Kickstarter. The company has just concluded fulfillment of Herbstation preorders after a self-admitted “share of delays, mixups, and drama.” Buyer beware.

Photo: Altifarm

As of now, Pico is slated to begin shipping in May/June, though a small disclaimer at the bottom of the campaign notes that that could be delayed due to stay at home orders. Buying a product off a crowdfunding site is always a risk — especially now, when COVID-19 is disrupting manufacturing supply chains across the globe. However, Altifarm states that since Pico is their third global product launch, they’ve learned how to efficiently get a hardware product to market.

Despite the risks, Pico couldn’t be hitting the market at a more opportune time. With COVID nudging consumers to be more aware of where their food comes from — and people consequently gaining an interest in food sovereignty — home gardening is blooming (okay, last plant pun).

Pico’s stellar Kickstarter campaign illustrates just how enthusiastic consumers are about finding ways to easily grow their own food at home. Now we’ll have to see if they can follow through to make all those backers happy home gardeners.

Farmshelf Unveils Its First Consumer-facing Vertical Farming Unit

Farmshelf, the vertical farming company best known for outfitting restaurants with its high-tech indoor farms, today unveiled its first-ever consumer-facing product, according to a company press release.

Dubbed Farmshelf Home, the new product is similar to the company’s commercial model championed by high-profile chefs like José Andrés. It’s roughly the size of a bookcase and uses a combination of sensors, cameras, software, and custom LEDs to automatically deliver the correct levels of water, light, and nutrients to each plant growing in the farm.

For the average consumer, that means once the farm arrives, it’s a matter of plugging it into a wall, connecting it to wifi, setting seeds in pods, then remotely monitoring the hydroponic system from a corresponding smartphone app.

Farmshelf Home is available to pre-order through the company’s website. Though it ain’t cheap: the company lists the “exclusive pre-order price” at $4,950, while the standard retail price will be set at $6,450. There is a $100 deposit (applied to the price and also refundable) as well as a monthly $35 fee that covers seed pods, nutrients, and access to the Farmshelf software for monitoring plants. At the moment, those interested only need to hand over the deposit to sign up for a pre-order. According to the fine print, there is no firm delivery date yet.

Three months ago, I would have called the high price point a deterrent for most people. Certainly, the average American family won’t be purchasing a Farmshelf anytime soon.

But those in higher income brackets may. A global pandemic has revealed just how out of whack our food supply chain is and what happens when people panic shop in droves and grocery stores can’t keep up, factors that might justify the price point for some folks. The Spoon’s Publisher Michael Wolf pointed out recently that “As the coronavirus has forced all of us to think more about our food supply, some consumers have gone beyond just buying a little extra food to store away. Now they are thinking about how we could ensure access to food independent of breakdowns in the system.”

Now we have to see whether consumers will pay thousands of dollars to ensure that independence. More at-home vertical farming companies were coming to market even before the pandemic, with large appliance makers like Samsung, LG, and Miele announcing high-tech gardens meant for your kitchen or living room. They range in price from the hundreds to the thousands, though not quite as high as Farmshelf.

Currently, Farmshelf is in a number of restaurants and hotels, including NYC chain Tender Greens, Marriott Marquis Times Square, and the Condé Nast offices. Angel network she1K syndicated an early-stage investment in the company at the end of last year.

As Coronavirus Fuels Interest in Food Sovereignty, Will Smart Gardens Finally Have Their Moment?

As someone interested in consumer behavior, I have to admit a pandemic makes for a compelling case study in how people will react when our normally stable food system gets a shock.

The panic buying. The embrace of processed food. The baking of bread. It’s all fascinating and provides a small glimpse into how consumers could behave when they believe, perhaps for the first time in their lives, that the relative ease with which they’ve had access to food is threatened.

All of which brings to the forefront a larger conversation about food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is something governments and interest groups debate all the time, such as when island countries like Japan worry (rightly) about over-reliance on imports or a lack of native agricultural production.

Consumers, however, usually don’t speak in the language of food sovereignty. That might soon change.

As the coronavirus has forced all of us to think more about our food supply, some consumers have gone beyond just buying a little extra food to store away. Now they are thinking about how we could ensure access to food independent of breakdowns in the system.

While that doesn’t mean we’re all going to buy lots of land and start a farm, it does mean more people than ever are looking into how to grow their own food at home.

That could mean something like raising chickens. According to Google Trends, interest in the topic has shot to an all time high.

More likely though, the notion of food independence for most consumers will mean starting a garden. Interest in starting home gardens has, like raising chickens, jumped to unprecedented levels. Seed sellers across the country are telling new customers they can’t take new orders. Meanwhile, gardening classes are on the rise. One virtual Master Gardener series from Oregon Stage saw registrations jump 12,000 percent over the previous spring.

So while a Victory Garden-esque resurgence in home gardens may be sprouting across the country, unlike those World War II-era home gardeners, we have access to technology can help us grow food nowadays.

The question is will consumers choose to use it?

In pre-pandemic times, the answer of whether consumers embrace tech-powered gardening is mostly a no. Wi-Fi powered home watering systems for the backyard have largely flopped, while smart in-home grow systems have been around for a while but have had mixed success.

That could change with a pandemic.

I decided to check with both AeroGrow (maker of the AeroGarden) and Click & Grow, the two leading smart garden brands, to see how business is going since COVID-19 took hold.

According to AeroGrow CEO J. Michael Wolfe, there’s has been a surge in interest since mid-March across all of their sales channels.

“Inventories are running low,” Wolfe told me via email. “We have raced to spin up the supply chain in Asia (and they were relatively fast to get back up to capacity), but we have surged so much that the supply we had on hand was not able to keep up with demand.”

Click & Grow spokesperson Martin Laidla told me that the increase in demand has been “substantial.”

“So far, we’ve seen a staggering twofold increase in demand for our products in all markets,” said Laidla.

The AeroGarden Farm (Image Credit: AeroGrow)

Smaller smart garden manufacturers are also seeing surging interest. Ava Technologies, which began with a crowdfund campaign for its Byte herb garden, has accelerated a second batch of manufacturing to take advantage of increased interest. According to Ava CEO Valerie Song, visits to the company’s preorder page is up over 1,300 percent versus just a month ago.

The strong demand makes sense. After all, smart gardens take up a small footprint and can grow greens at a pretty fast clip due to a fine-tuned grow environment of high-intensity light, automated watering and nutrients.

But these high-tech indoor grow systems have a few drawbacks, the first of which is price. While low-end AeroGardens start roughly below $50, the bigger systems that can grow a substantial amount of produce start at around $240. The AeroGarden Farm, which allows for 24 “pods” of seeds to be planted simultaneously, start at close to $600.

The second problem, which is directly related to price of the system, is yield. While lower-priced smaller systems from Click & Grow and AeroGarden look good on a kitchen counter and can pump out herbs, that’s mainly it. To actually grow veggies in enough volume to feed you let alone a family, you have to look a higher-end system like the AeroGarden Farm.

But despite the higher price tags of higher yield systems, consumers still seem interested. AeroGarden’s higher yield systems like the Bounty and the Farm are sold out on Amazon and Home Depot, and the AeroGarden has even stopped selling the Farm on their own site as they’ve run out of inventory.

“The Farm sold out in early March,” said AeroGrow’s Wolfe. “We won’t have replenishment for a few more weeks. I expect that we’ll sell out of the replenishment inventory that arrives in a matter of days — and then more will arrive in June.”

So while smart garden systems might not be for everyone, it appears that the arrival of a pandemic might actually push these systems more into the mainstream.

One thing I’m curious about is how this increased demand plays out in the longer term. I could envision a post-pandemic world where, in a more normalized economic situation, new homes come with an option for a home grow system built into the kitchen. Some master planned communities could make vertical farming a big part of the sales pitch.

At CES and KBIS, I counted four major appliance brands who had smart garden grow systems in development, and I could see those plans accelerating and even more brands jumping into the grow system fray.

As for now, if you want your own high-yield smart farm system, you’ll need to get in line. Of course, if you have a yard and you’re the adventurous type, you can always buy a robotic farm for the back yard.

Gotham Greens Expands Its High-Tech Greenhouse Network to Baltimore

Indoor farming company Gotham Greens today announced the official opening of a new hydroponic greenhouse, this one outside Baltimore, Maryland. The 100,000-square-foot facility is the company’s seventh greenhouse in the U.S., and its first one to grow year-round produce, according to a press release from Gotham Greens. 

The launch of the Baltimore facility arrives on the heels of Gotham Greens’ first New England facility, which opened in Providence, Rhode Island at the very end of 2019. The company also operates locations in Brooklyn, Chicago, and Denver.

All of Gotham’s greenhouses use hydroponics, a method of growing plants without soil. Crops grow in trays (as opposed to the tower-like structure found in other hydroponic farms) and receive a constant stream of water enriched with nutrients that is soaked up by the plant roots. Proprietary software lets farms automate much of the plant monitoring and management, so that they can find the best “recipe” of temperature, humidity, and light levels needed for each crop.

Gotham Greens said in the press release that the new farm in Baltimore will grow “more than six million heads of lettuce annually,” which is roughly the same amount grown by other large-scale indoor farming operations, Kalera and Plenty among them. 

Millions of heads of greens grown throughout the year means a greater number of consumers around the country can access fresher produce harvested much more recently and closer to the store. But these warehouse-sized indoor farms are no longer the only indoor agtech operations supplying the consumer demand for local food. Companies like Freight Farms and Square Roots operate smaller farms housed inside shipping containers, some of which are located next door to major food distribution centers. Others, like InFarm, are going even more local by putting the farm in the grocery store.

There are also a number of efforts being made to bring indoor farming concepts right into the consumer home, though it’ll be a while before farms become standard kitchen appliances. Even when they do, it’s unlikely a consumer-focused farm from someone like LG would even compete directly with Gotham Greens, which serves businesses rather than consumers and grows produce in vastly larger quantities.

The new Gotham Greens farm in Baltimore will provide greens to restaurant and foodservice customers across 10 states in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern U.S.

Meet the Natufia Kitchen Garden, the $13,000 Home Garden System from Estonia

After spending almost an entire week in Las Vegas earlier this month for CES, I reluctantly returned to the desert on Monday for the Kitchen and Bath Show.

And just like I did at the big consumer tech show, I found an oasis inside the convention center in the form of an indoor gardening system. Only this time the leafy greens were not featured as part of a proof-of-concept from the likes of GE, LG or Samsung, but instead inside of a product already on the market from a scrappy startup out of Estonia.

The company is Natufia Labs, a venture backed startup, and the product is the Natufia Kitchen Garden, a $13 thousand home garden that has been shipping in Europe for a year and has just landed in the U.S.

I stopped by Natufia’s booth at KBIS where the company’s CEO Gregory Lu gave me a quick video tour of the Kitchen Garden. As you can see in the video, the product is a self-contained cabinet that creates an optimal recipe of water, lighting and nutrients to help grow, according to Lu, enough output to product “one to two salads per day.”

Water and nutrients are dispensed automatically through the central monitoring system that is controlled via a touchscreen display in the bottom cabinet. Alongside the control system in the lower cabinet is a seedling chamber where the user puts seeds for 10 days in a small seedpod unit to allow them to germinate. From there, the seedlings are transferred into one of the ceramic looking pots in the upper glass chamber where they will grow and eventually be harvested.

Like the Samsung BeSpoke system, I liked the look and idea of a fully contained standup cabinet gardening system with the Natufia. It looked good and I could envision this type of garden system finding a home within my kitchen some day.

However, I have to admit the $13,000 price tag gave me pause. I wondered if I’d be willing to pay that much to add a home grow system, particularly one that — like most of these systems — is largely restricted to growing leafy greens and for the most part does not produce non-leafy green vegetables like cucumbers or ground vegetables like potatoes or onions.

In the end, these types of systems are a lifestyle and design choice that will be made by the home owner. If you’re buying a new house or committing $80,000 or more to a kitchen remodel, adding in one of these systems makes sense if you love the idea of shortening the distance between farm and fork to just a few meters, even if it’s for only a partial list of the items that go in your salad.

There’s also no doubt that these systems make a visual statement, standing out from the usual wall of metal or wood typically found in high-end kitchens.

The Natufia Kitchen Garden is available in the U.S. through select resellers. You can see the guided tour of the Natufia Kitchen Garden below in the video.

A Look at the Natufia Home Kitchen Garden

Rise Gardens Is on a Mission to Make the Smart Farm Part of the Everyman’s Kitchen

One question we’ve asked for a while here at The Spoon is whether vertical farms will eventually make their way into the average consumer’s home. Versions of these farms self-contained, temperature controlled smart gardens have existed for years now, but they’ve historically gotten the most adoption among startups and independent food producers selling to local retailers.

Of late, however, a number of companies have come to market with indoor-farming devices built not for industrial-grade production but for the average person’s home or apartment. Among them is Rise Gardens, a Chicago-based startup that makes an indoor farming system that looks like a piece of furniture, takes minutes to set up, and can be controlled remotely with a smartphone app.

Rise’s product, among others, is a far cry from some of the at-home farming concepts appliance-makers like GE and LG showed off at CES this year as they unveiled fridge-sized products meant to be built right into the kitchen cabinetry. But it does the same job, and, arguably, in a cheaper, more user-friendly way.

The Chicago-based Rise has been hard at work for the last couple of years making prototypes of its indoor farming device, a standalone console that can grow greens year-round and is small enough to function as another piece of furniture inside someone’s house. The company started selling its product to the U.S. and Canada markets in August of 2019.

Like other consumer-grade hydroponic farms, Rise Gardens’ device is a self-contained system that grows leafy greens in a temperature-controlled environment, with much of the work automated by technology. “If you just use our device without the app, it might still be four or five hours [of work] per week. That’s why we created the app,” says Blondet. “What the app is doing is automating things on the back end that a farmer would do.”

That includes calculating temperature, nutrition and pH levels, as well as determining when and how much to water the plants. Were a user to do this manually, Blondet says, they would need to perform some relatively complicated mathematics to get this kind of information. Rise Gardens’ app works with a sensor (“kind of like a Fitbit but for plants”) to automate such calculations, so that a user simply gets notified when it’s time to re-up the water or nutrient supply, or harvest the plants.

Rise Gardens’ farms are also modular in that they can be added to over time if a user wants more space to grow greens. The console itself, where the farm lives, resembles a standalone cabinet and is assembled by the user. A single-level farm (see below) is roughly the size of an entry-way table and comes with 12 plant pods. Users who want to grow more plants over time can add second and third levels, so that the largest system resembles a bookshelf.


Blondet notes that one of Rise Gardens’ goals in coming up with the product design was to have it fit inside a consumer’s home as easily as most other appliances. In other words, it’s just another piece of furniture, albeit a highly functional one. “We didn’t want to disrupt the home, we want to fit in it,” he says. He adds that an earlier version of the Rise Gardens farm more resembled a refrigerator. As LG showed us at CES this month, fridge-like designs are coming. But not yet. “Right now, no one is going to remodel their kitchen to fit this,” Blondet says of the fridge-style size and design. Rise chose its current design in part to appeal to consumers who would like to keep their greens hyper-local but can’t or won’t remodel a home just to do so.

Rise is one of many companies taking this approach, which seems to be fast becoming a good middle ground between a built-in appliance and a bag of lettuce from the grocery store. Aspara, n.thing’s Planty Cube, Seedo, Verdeat . . . the list goes on, and it’s getting lengthier each month. Another appliance-maker, Miele, is also getting involved in the space, having acquired German startup Agrilution and its wine-fridge-sized Plantcube product in 2019.

As more consumers get familiar with the concept, Blondet suggests a future in which these kinds of systems are ubiquitous, where seed packs can be bought at a grocery retailer like Whole Foods (right now they have to be special ordered), and every kitchen will be designed to accommodate some type of indoor farm. 

By way of example, he mentions the dishwasher. “Forty years ago, no one had a dishwasher. And then slowly but surely the dishwasher made its way into people’s lives,” he says. “I think [indoor farming] is the type of thing that will slowly but surely make its way into the design of the kitchen.”

Are In-Home Vertical Farms the Next Big Appliance for Connected Kitchens?

A little less than a year ago, The Spoon looked at a number of hydroponic farming devices that could fit into the average person’s apartment. These were for the most part table-top models or units that could hang on a wall. At the time, the concept of having a grow system in your own home seemed more than a little novel.

Fast forward to now and things have changed. Putting an indoor vertical farm in the average consumer’s home isn’t yet a mainstream concept, but as more startups and major appliance-makers alike have shown over the last 12 months, the idea is making its way into the Everyman’s kitchen with more speed these days. Now, thanks to a bunch of concepts shown off at this year’s CES, suddenly the idea of having a smart farm in your kitchen doesn’t seem so novel.

Whether you’re contemplating your own home grow system or just curious, here’s a look at what’s available and what’s in the pipeline.

Aspara

If you’re like me, you have minimal space (almost none, really) in the home for adding much in the way of smart farming systems. Aspara’s hydroponic growing device could potentially solve that problem because it’s small — 14 inches high and 21 inches wide — and could reasonably fit on a countertop, shelf, or even on top of the refrigerator. The system uses a combination of LEDs, an auto-watering feature, and sensors that detect nutrient levels, humidity and air, and other factors to create the optimal grow “recipe” for the plants. 

After a user does the initial planting of the seeds, the Aspara app manages most of the grow process, notifying the user when it’s time to refill the water tank and harvest the plants. It also includes tips and recipes for growing and lets you monitor multiple Aspara farms at the same time.

The device is currently available in Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the U.S. through online retailers. For U.S. buyers, the device currently goes for $259.99 on Amazon for just the machine and $339.99 with a starter seed kit included.

Rise Gardens

Chicago, IL startup Rise Gardens is one of those companies aiming to make a truly “plug in and go” indoor vertical farming system for the home. This one is a standalone console that can be purchased with one, two, or three “levels” for plants and weighs between 60 and 106 pounds depending on the size.

A user assembles the garden — much as you would a piece of furniture from IKEA, from the looks of it — then downloads the app, which controls the lighting and nutrients schedule and reminds the user when it’s time to water the plants. Each garden comes with a starter pack of 12 plant pods that can be inserted directly into the grow trays. 

Price ranges from $549 for a single-level console to $949 for a triple. 

Agrilution’s Plantcube

Not to be confused with Plantycube (see below), the Plantcube made headlines at the end of 2019 when its maker, a German company called Agrilution, was acquired by appliance-maker Miele. Less device than full-on kitchen appliance, the Plantcube automates temperature, light, climate, and water levels of the indoor vertical farm, and can be controlled from within the Agrilution app. 

The appliance looks like a wine cooler and is about the same size. However, unlike a wine cooler or any of the systems listed above, the Plantcube is meant to be built directly into your kitchen cupboards or beneath a countertop. That would perhaps explain the price point: €2,979 (~$3,300 USD), a figure most consumers wouldn’t spend on an indoor farm right now. Even for those who would, the device is currently only available to those in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Luxemburg or the Netherlands.

Even so, the concept Plantcube pushes is one to watch. It’s entirely possible that appliances like these eventually become as common in the home kitchen as microwaves. The price point would have to come way down for that to become a reality, which is one reason we’re watching Plantcube closely in the future.

GE Home Grow

As The Spoon’s Mike Wolf wrote recently, CES 2020’s standout in the consumer kitchen was GE because, “rather than create product demos designed as show-off vehicles for new technologies, GE illustrated how these technologies could be employed in a cohesive, systematic way to provide consumers answers to some of their biggest problems.”

Among those technologies was Home Grown, GE’s indoor gardening concept that uses a combination of hydroponics, aeroponics, and soil-based grow systems that are built directly into the kitchen design. For each of the three systems, water, nutrient, and light delivery are controlled through an app, which also guides the user through the seeding and harvesting stages of the grow process. 

The system also offers consumers information on the health benefits of each plant as well as how to prepare herbs and greens in meals once they are harvested. 

Home Grow is purely conceptual at this stage, so there’s no price point on these systems. Like the Plantcube, however, GE is thinking bigger than the just-another-appliance concept and imagining a system that can encourage healthier eating, reduce food waste, and increase consumer education around the foods they’re eating.

Honorable Mentions

We’ve covered these in-depth already, but LG and Plantycube are also at the forefront of bringing vertical farming technology into the consumer kitchen. Both showed off products at CES this year.

LG’s forthcoming appliance is the size of a fridge and, as I wrote recently, “takes many of the functions found in commercial-scale indoor farming and applies them to a device specifically made for the average consumer.”

N.thing’s Planty Cube, meanwhile, is a highly modular indoor farming system that can be small enough to fit on a countertop or large enough to serve cafeterias at schools, offices, and other institutions.

Since things are never as simple as they seem, there are obviously still a lot of questions around these “plug-in-and-grow” systems. Will they raise consumers’ utility bill significantly? What happens if they break? Are they worth the cost if they can only grow leafy greens and not more substantial veggies, like carrots or broccoli? 

Many more questions will sprout up as companies introduce new systems to the consumer market, and it’s ok that those questions won’t get answered immediately. The more important point here is that entrepreneurs and corporations both are testing new ways to make food cleaner, more local, and more in the consumer’s control. Right now, we need concepts as compact as an Aspera and as conceptual as GE’s Home Grown right now to help get us there.

Plants, Personalization & Precision Cooking: A Look at GE Appliances’ CES 2020 Lineup

Each year, it seems one appliance brand stands out at CES with an interesting new take on the kitchen that intrigues with the possibilities.

At CES 2019, it was Whirlpool, who shocked and awed with the sheer amount of new product concepts they rolled out, including an augmented reality-enabled smart oven.

This year’s CES standout in the kitchen was GE Appliances. Not because the appliance company had a whole bunch of cool products ready to roll out to market, but more because they showcased a bigger way of thinking around solving real-world issues. In other words, rather than create product demos designed as show-off vehicles for new technologies, GE illustrated how these technologies could be employed in a cohesive, systematic way to provide consumers answers to some of their biggest problems.

Here are the three demos I saw at the GE Appliances booth that caught my attention:

Home Grown

While intelligent home grow systems seemed to catch on at CES this year with big appliance brands for the first time, the most interesting conceptualization of an indoor, tech-powered gardening came from GE. The company’s Home Grown concept featured a mix of hydroponics, aeroponics and soil-based grow systems built into the design of the kitchen as part of a cohesive sustainable kitchen workflow.

You can see a full walkthrough of the Home Grown concept below:

CES 2020: A Tour of 'Home Grown', the GE Appliances Garden Kitchen Concept

One thing that struck me about the Home Grown concept is it commanded a lot of space. I have to wonder how many consumers would be willing to give up such a large part of their kitchen counter real estate to growing food, and I can see how brown thumbs like myself would be worried they’d soon have dead plants spread across their entire kitchen.

That said, Home Grown is largely conceptual at this point, so the company shouldn’t be penalized by more practical concerns like the sheer size of the demo. Once (and if) the products gets closer to market, GE can make adjustments with different size gardens to fit specific needs.

Shift

GE’s ‘Shift’ proof of concept showed how the company saw itself at the center a fully intelligent – and personalized – physical kitchen space.

So what is Shift? In the simplest terms, it’s an adaptable (or shiftable) physical kitchen space that personalizes itself towards the needs of each user.

The concept video below was put together by GE to illustrate how Shift could help a wheelchair-bound user:

CES 2020: The GE Appliances "Shift" Kitchen Concept Reel for Special Needs User with Wheelchair

In an era where everything is becoming more personalized, the idea of a personalized physical space based on the specific needs of the person makes lots of sense. Much like we have the ability to adjust our car seat to fit our own height or buy shoes that fit our feet, there’s no reason why in an era of lower cost robotics, IoT and smart sensors we shouldn’t think about adapting the space around us to fit our needs.

Kitchen Hub 2020

Finally, at CES 2020 GE rolled out the second edition of its Kitchen Hub , its kitchen screen/home command center.

You can see a walkthrough of the product shot at the GE Appliances booth below:

CES 2020: A Look at the GE Kitchen Hub 2

The most obvious difference with the new version is GE made the video touch screen the front door of a usable microwave oven. They also added an additional camera over the counter prep station as an option as well as improved food image recognition. Tying the experience together for food recognition and guided cooking is the Freshly app (powered by SideChef), which will recognize food, suggest recipes, and provide cooking guidance.

Also cool: The improved machine vision allows the system to recognize progress within a cook session. Below the Kitchen Hub camera captures a picture of a steak on the grill and let’s the user know that it has reached the desired doneness.

What struck me most about this version of the Kitchen Hub compared to the 2018 first edition is how the latest version just seems more practical. As a useable front screen for the microwave, Kitchen Hub is simply more useful and less awkward than as a standalone TV screen sitting atop your cooking range.

It’s also seems to fit more organically as a natural part of a next-generation kitchen. By coordinating the various cooking systems and, eventually, what’s in the fridge (SideChef is powering Haier smart fridges ), it seems GE is working towards building a platform that delivers valuable cooking assistance, inventory management and smart home control without being overly forced.

I left GE’s booth thinking that while much of what they showed off is still a few years away, I appreciate the moonshot thinking of the Home Grown, Shift and the practical advances they’ve made with their Kitchen Hub platform.

Vertical Farms Will Become Key Parts of Your Grocery Store and Your Kitchen Cabinets in 2020

At this point we can expect vertical farming to play an important role in our future food system — one that goes beyond selling greens to upscale markets in gentrified urban neighborhoods. Exactly what that future role looks like is less certain as we move into 2020. Commercial-scale vertical farms, which grow millions of heads of greens in warehouses and shipping containers, still has a lot to prove in terms of economics and scalability.

While the industrial-scale model continues trying to prove itself in 2020, the place we may see the most compelling developments for vertical farming in the next year is actually in the consumer realm. E. coli outbreaks and bleached salad (among many other factors) have contributed to an uptick in consumer demand for fresher food that’s traveled fewer miles between the farm and the table. If the last year taught us anything, it’s that putting the farm is right next to your table, or at least at your local grocery retailer, is becoming a popular strategy for providing healthier, more traceable greens to consumers, and that trend will continue in 2020.

With startups, grocery stores, major appliance-makers, and others now exploring this area, some of these developments are already happening.

In your grocery store.

Many companies are now looking to shorten the supply chain between the farm and the consumer when it comes to produce. One way is to put the farm right in the grocery store. These aren’t massive facilities growing millions of heads of lettuce. Rather, they’re typically standalone, highly modular pods or units that can be set up right in the produce section. 

German startup InFarm highlighted this approach in 2019 when it partnered with Kroger to place units in 15 of the grocery retailers stores. The company also partnered with UK retailer Marks & Spencer for a similar venture in Britain. 

Another route is for farming startups to partner with major food distributors, as Square Roots has done by building farms near or on Gordon Food Service’s distribution centers. Gordon operates 175 of these across North America, and proximity to those facilities means Square Roots can get its greens distributed to a larger selection of grocery retailers.

In your kitchen cabinets. 

Indoor farms that fit in the home aren’t new. There are plenty of standalone, tabletop, or wall-mounted devices out there that let the average consumer grow greens year-round. What is new is that major appliance-makers are now exploring the possibilities of indoor farming as not another gadget for the kitchen but an integral part of that space’s design. 

We saw this recently when Miele acquired the assets to Agrilution, whose automated Plantcube farm is meant to be built right into the kitchen cabinetry. Just yesterday, LG announced it will be showing off its own in-kitchen smart farm at CES 2020 in a couple weeks.

These aren’t going to be cheap products. Plantcubes cost €2,979 (~$3,300 USD), and that doesn’t include the extra money tacked onto your energy bills each month for things like water and electricity. (LG hasn’t released pricing details yet.) Most likely, these in-cabinet farms will debut in new, single-family homes with ample amounts of space in the kitchen. As more appliance-makers develop products and team up with home retailers (IKEA, I’m looking at you), we’ll likely see the price point on these farms come down and the concept go a little more mainstream.