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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Smart Garden

LG Will Unveil an Indoor Farm for the Consumer Kitchen at CES 2020

With CES right around the corner, the announcements are pouring in for new gadgets and products to be on display at the Las Vegas show, including those that will change the way we cook, eat, and think about our food. 

Appliance-maker LG is the latest. The company announced this week it will unveil a smart gardening appliance for the consumer kitchen at CES 2020, one that uses advanced lighting, temperature, and water control to let consumers grow greens year-round inside their kitchens.

The as-yet unnamed appliance takes many of the functions found in commercial-scale indoor farming and applies them to a device specifically made for the average consumer. Software, controlled via the user’s smartphone determines the precise “recipe” of LED lights, air, and water the plants need and when that recipe should change based on the time of day. The goal is to replicate “optimal outdoor conditions by precisely matching the temperature inside the insulated cabinet with the time of day,” according to the announcement from LG.

This kind of control means users can grow herbs and leafy greens year-round if they choose, and with considerably more ease than they would have with an outdoor garden. Not only does a controlled indoor cabinet mean no pests (or pesticides for that matter), the companion app basically offers a step-by-step guide each day for growing, monitoring, and harvesting plants. It’s not unlike the many guided cooking apps out there offering granular advice every step of the way so that experts and less experienced users alike can use the tool successfully. 

LG’s new appliance marks the company’s first foray into the indoor gardening space — and possibly a new trend for the future of the home kitchen. Up to now, smart indoor farms for consumers have been mostly standalone devices that don’t necessarily have any connection with the home’s main kitchen. From the pictures, LG’s appliance can be built right into the cabinetry and modular enough to fit many different kitchen formats. 

LG isn’t the only company exploring how to do this. At the beginning of December, appliance-maker Miele acquired the assets of Agrilution, whose Plantcube indoor vertical farm can be directly built into home kitchens.

It will likely be a long time before we see such devices become standard parts of all kitchens. That idea of building indoor farming into the design of the kitchen was a concept explored in depth at SKS 2019 this past October. It looks expensive, time consuming, and complex right now, but more major appliance-makers entering the space means we’re slowly but surely inching towards the day when the cost of such systems can come down and the average consumer might someday see at-home smart farming become a reality. 

Kroger Partners with Infarm to Grow Greens in Grocery Stores

Kroger announced today that it has partnered with Berlin-based Infarm to install modular, indoor vertical farms in some of its grocery stores.

According to the press release, the deal will place Infarm units at 15 of Kroger’s QFC stores, starting with two locations this month in Bellevue and Kirkland, Washington.

Infarm creates high-tech pods that can be installed in locations like grocery stores or restaurants. These pods use a combination of hydroponics and cloud-connected software to monitor growing elements like light, air, nutrients, etc. Right now, Infarm units can grow leafy greens like lettuce and a variety of herbs.

The promise of indoor vertical farms like Infarm’s is reducing the environmental footprint of produce by eliminating the need for transportation. This proximity also translates to fresher food for the consumer as it’s picked on-site.

That all sounds great, but as my colleague Jenn Marston wrote recently, the promise of vertical farming has yet to pay off:

As an industry, vertical farming has yet to prove itself as an environmentally and economically efficient piece of the agriculture system, and along with the hype are more and more stories about complications or outright closures of vertical farms. Already, a company called FarmedHere shut down in 2017, Plantagon went bankrupt in March of 2019, and just recently, MIT halted work on its controversial Open Agriculture Initiative project after reportedly exaggerating results of its vertical farming experiments.

Those disappointments, however, were around larger scale vertical farms. Perhaps Infarm, with its smaller, in-store approach can succeed where others have failed.

Infarm continues to, well plow ahead. The company raised a $100 million Series B round earlier this year, and announced a partnership to bring its vertical farm pods to Marks and Spencer stores in the U.K.

Bellevue and Kirkland aren’t that far from The Spoon HQ, so you can expect one of us to make the trip and pick some in-store produce soon.

Verdeat Delays Kickstarter Launch for Its Hydroponic Garden System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Verdeat Is Launching a Kickstarter for Its Hydroponic Garden System For the Home

Poznań, Poland-based company Verdeat announced this week it will launch a Kickstarter campaign in July for its modular vertical farm meant to fit inside apartments, offices, and other non-commercial spaces.

Like other indoor hydroponic grow systems, Verdeat is able to cultivate most plants without the use of soil, though unlike a lot of systems, the 35 cm cylindrical device will still accommodate soil in certain configurations. The modular trays that come with the device can be switched out based on what you’re trying to grow, whether seeds and sprouts, which get planted in a substrate (like coconut fiber), or a potted basil plant you nabbed at the grocery store.

The entire system is controlled by a smartphone app that takes the majority of the guesswork out of the growing process, from knowing how much water to give each type of plant to how to adjust the LEDs to produce the right amount of sun-like light. The user simply fills the grow tray, adds some nutrients, and starts the app, which, according to an email from Verdeat, can run the farm more or less autonomously, only requiring the user to add nutrients every one to three weeks depending on the plants. The company also claims that plants in the Verdeat system grow faster and ripen 40 percent sooner than traditionally grown herbs and vegetables. At the moment, Verdeat’s system can grow the usual selection of herbs and leafy greens found in most vertical farms, as well as strawberries, peppers, blueberries, and other fruits.

Once the Kickstarter campaign launches, backers will be able to choose from a small, medium, or large device, depending on their individual space requirements. Remember earlier this year when The Spoon looked at vertical farms that would fit into closet-sized apartments? Verdeat definitely fits that criteria. It’s also reminiscent of the self-watering, hydroponic farm-in-a-pillar Zooey Deschanel is currently selling via her startup Lettuce Grow, and of Seedo, whose self-contained, airtight farm looks like a mini fridge.

In fact, with the vertical farming market expected to be worth $9.96 billion by 2025, we’ll see many more of these at-home versions of the vertical farm surfacing alongside more industrial-sized, hyper-automated counterparts.

How Verdeat fares amid all this competition will depend largely on some factors the company hasn’t yet released, including the cost of each device unit, how widely available it will be (it’s manufactured in the EU), and how long backers will have to wait before they can actually get their hands on the device and start growing. If they get their hands on it: As we’ve seen with other crowdfunded hardware projects, there is always the possibility that the product might not make it to market as promised. But perhaps manufacturing right there in the EU, will make it easier for Verdeat to keep tabs on the process and avoid those pitfalls.

The Kickstarter campaign will launch at the very beginning of July.

Seedo Ramps Up Manufacturing for Its Hydroponic Farm in a Box

Indoor farming company Seedo announced it will manufacture more than 1,800 of its indoor grow boxes in Q2 of 2019.

Seedo’s device is a self-contained, airtight box that looks like a mini-fridge and automates the process of growing herbs and vegetables hydroponically. The device pairs with a smartphone app that lets users choose a grow plan or create their own, control and modify the environment in the box, and receive notifications about plant health, harvest times, and any unexpected issues. You can also lock or unlock the fridge door with the app, a feature that seems handy for households with curious pets or small children.

The device will fit inside most homes, clocking in at 40 inches tall and 24.4 inches wide. It has space to grow up to five different plant types at one time. With the aid of the app, users can adjust environmental factors based on what’s being grown. For example, tomatoes require a lot of light and fairly dry conditions for ideal growing, so Seedo users can adjust the “weather” inside the box to get those conditions. Meanwhile, a patent-pending lighting system self-adjusts based on the growth stage of the plants.

Most interesting about Seedo is the types of plants the company says you can grow with the device. The website lists the usual herbs and lettuces most at-home vertical farms can grow, as well as some heartier options: strawberries, cherry tomatoes, bell peppers, and zucchini. You can also grow flowers, edible or otherwise.

The Israel-based company has also filed a new patent that will cover the AI and data analytic algorithms of its agricultural database. According to the press release, these algorithms are built to increase yield, improve nutrient delivery to the plants, and detect issues in real time.

Right now, you can pre-order a Seedo for $2,400. That cost includes the box itself, various filters (water, air), nutrients to get started, and access to the app (iOS and Android). Actual seeds are not included.

That’s considerably more expensive than some other options available for purchase or pre-order: the Herbert farm by Ponix systems is selling for around $553 USD. SproutsIO, which is expected to ship in Q3 of 2019, is going for $799. And the Farmstand, courtesy of Zooey Deschanel’s new startup Lettuce Grow, ranges from $399 to $469 for the farm itself and $49 to $69 for a monthly subscription that includes seeds.

Seedo’s customer base is currently made up of at-home growers and some commercial partners. The company recently announced a partnership with Kibbutz Dan, with whom it will create a fully automated, commercial-scale cannabis farm in Israel. Previously, Seedo had established a medical cannabis farm in Moshav Brosh, Israel. Seedo raised a $4 million post-IPO equity round in April.

Seedo expects to start shipping machines in August 2019. It’s currently available for pre-order in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel.

Zooey Deschanel Has a New Startup Selling Hydroponic Farms for the Home

Nowadays, there’s any number of ways to have a hydroponic farm at home: wall-mounted gardens, countertop farms, and pillars that grow fresh greens. The latter is possible thanks to actress Zooey Deschanel’s new startup Lettuce Grow, through which she and her husband Jacob Pechenik launched the Farmstand, their take on a hydroponic farm.

Farmstand, which debuted at SXSW in Austin, TX in March, is a self-watering, self-fertilizing farm that grows in a pillar-like fixture made from recycled plastics. As of right now, the farms are meant for outdoors. Clocking in at a little over one foot wide and between four and six feet tall, depending on the model, the farm takes much of the guesswork out of growing by automating the watering and nutrient delivery process inside the pillar.

Image via Lettuce Grow

To set up a farm, there is a one-time fee for the hardware, then a monthly subscription fee for a grow plan that includes regular seedling deliveries along with nutrients every two weeks. If that seems like a lot, it’s because Pechenik and Deschanel are hoping you’ll use the farms every day to harvest food for regular cooking. Monthly memberships range from $49 for four growing levels to $69 per month for six growing levels. Users can choose from a number of different plans to get seedlings that best suit their needs.

Pechenik and Deschanel told INC that the idea began as a way to provide their family with fresher greens, and that going forward, their mission is to “allow people to grow at least 20 percent of their food at home.” To that end, plant varieties a customer will receive with their subscription are based on geographic location: an algorithm selects plants best suited to grow in, say, Texas weather.  An accompanying app makes recommendations about when to harvest, add nutrients and water, and offers recipes and growing advice. And if you wind up needing more grow space, each farm is easily expanded by snapping another growing level onto the top of the farm.

Right now Farmstand is a little less sophisticated than other consumer-grade models out there in the sense that the plants still need natural sunlight to grow. According to the Lettuce Grow website, lighting kits for indoor growing are in the works, along with a wifi and cellular-enabled IoT device to better monitor water, pH, and power levels in the soil.

Farmstand won’t be the only ones pushing indoor hydroponic grow systems. In fact, there are already several options on the market or taking pre-orders that make the concept easy and easy to fit within even the smallest apartments, from the wall-mounted Herbert by Ponix Systems to CityCrop’s teeny-tiny countertop device.

Lettuce Grow is currently taking pre-orders for Farmstand.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to the product as “the Farmstead.”

Element Farms Uses Tech to Grow the Holy Grail of Hydroponic Farming: Spinach

Spinach is fickle. It’s one of the most popular leafy greens out there, but also one of the most delicate and prone to bacteria and disease–factors that only increase when wind, rain, and dirty equipment are involved in the growing process.

It stands to reason, then, that it’s a great crop to take indoors, but massive hydroponic indoor farms like AeroFarms or Gotham Greens don’t grow it on their farms.

Part of the reason for that, according to Element Farms CEO and cofounder Serdar Mizrakci, is that spinach is prone to plant diseases in high-density environments, and most hydroponic farms lack the tools and knowledge to combat those things and still get a consistent crop. But after years of fine-tuning both tools and knowledge, Mizrakci and Element Farms are doing just that, growing spinach and selling it to grocery retailers under its PureSpinach brand.

Mizrakci got the idea for Element Farms after moving to the U.S. from Turkey and discovering how much more difficult it was to get fresh greens any time of year. Then an MBA student at Cornell, he started visiting greenhouses on campus and realized an opportunity. “Conventional farming and hydroponics [make] an assumption that the plants like a certain climate,” he said over the phone. “As soon as they sprout, you put them in one spot and keep feeding them the same thing. But that’s not really true in terms of what [spinach] needs. We’re essentially controlling that process a lot more precisely.”

To do that, Element Farms use a combination of hydroponics and proprietary technology to grow spinach indoors. According to Mizrakci, the current farm uses about 90 percent less water than traditional agriculture during the grow process and can produce more greens in a shorter time frame (around 14 days versus the standard 30 days).

As far as tech goes the company uses proprietary, patent-pending software and sensors to control the environment, as well as customized harvesting equipment that can automate much of the grow process. All hydroponic farms use LED technology in place of the natural sunlight plants need. Element Farms’ technology is actually a dynamic lighting algorithm that combines the natural sunlight in a greenhouse with high-capacity LEDs; when the natural light starts to dim, the LEDs turn on. The platform also provides supplemental carbon dioxide to the plants, also not something found in many hydroponic farms.

“What we’re essentially doing is another layer of precision control that helps us grow healthier, easier, disease free plants,” says Mizrakci.

Element’s business model is all about providing locally grown greens. (It grows some arugula, baby kale and mustard greens, though spinach is the company’s main focus right now.) The company, which currently supplies select grocery retailers in the tristate area, only ships to stores within 100 miles of the farm, and all shipments are greens harvested within the last 24 hours.

According to Mizrakci, though, getting people to eat local is only one of the company’s goals. “I think we need to keep striving to provide people with produce that doesn’t have to compromise quality,” he says. “I see us going lower in price point than conventional salad greens today.”

Currently PureSpinach sells for about the same price as organic greens. The next step, says Mizrakci, is to get that price point on par with conventional greens and in doing so introduce hydroponic spinach to swaths of the population for whom high-end greens are typically out of reach. He wants to be the first to get high-end greens into lower-end retail stores. And as he sees it, bringing the price point down will encourage people to try PureSpinach, and it’s the taste that usually changes people’s minds: “A lot of folks don’t know what it means to have fresher produce. Once they taste it, they’ll understand what those claims are about.”

Element Farms is currently raising money through a crowdfunding campaign at Wefunder. The goal is to raise $500,000 to help the company with its national expansion plan, which includes moving to greenhouses in Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix, Dallas, Indianapolis, and a handful of other cities. The company also just purchased a new facility in central New Jersey, where it will begin operations this summer.

Sweetgreen Connects Schools With Fresher Foods By Emphasizing Choice

Imagine being able to vote on your school cafeteria’s lunch options each week. Even in the ’80s, I doubt many of us would have chosen soggy fries and cardboard-like pizza. But we probably wouldn’t have chosen vegetables, either.

Fast-casual salad chain Sweetgreen wants to change kids’ attitudes about healthy meals by introducing them in a way that educates students about the importance of fresh food while still giving them choice over what they’re eating. To do so, the Washington, D.C.-based company has partnered with non-profit organization FoodCorps, an AmeriCorps entity that works to find different ways of getting healthier food into schools, to pilot the Reimagining School Cafeterias program in schools around the U.S. (h/t Fast Company).

Reimagining School Cafeterias takes existing school food programs and, with input from Sweetgreen’s culinary team, works to “guide students to make healthier choices and create more inclusive and joyful cafeteria experiences.” Sweetgreen has pledged $1 million over the next two years towards further developing the Reimagining School Cafeterias program. The initiative was announced earlier this month and is currently in three schools in the U.S. Since it builds off existing programs within each school, Reimagining School Cafeterias looks different in each location.

In New Mexico’s Navajo Nation territory, students at Wingate Elementary School can learn about and try out various sauces and spices at the school’s Taste Buds Flavor Bar. The Tasty Challenge, at Aberdeen Elementary School in Aberdeen, NC, lets kids try different fresh produce, prepared in different styles, and vote on what they like best. And in Oakland, CA, Laurel Elementary students brainstorm ideas about how to make their cafeteria better, from the way the room is set up to what’s offered in terms of food.

Getting better, fresher food into schools in the U.S. is a mission more and more organizations are taking on, from Ford Motors introducing vertical farming to schools in Detroit to Teens for Food Justice working in The Bronx to teach youths farming techniques. Those efforts are needed: An estimated 1 in 8 Americans are considered food insecure, including about 12 million children.

What’s interesting about Sweetgreen’s approach to schools is how the fast-casual chain takes its business approach of building your own meals and translates it to the school setting. In other words, it introduces students to healthier eating by giving them choices, and without shoving a plate of green beans at them and forcing them to eat it.

Sweetgreen does a number of community service initiatives, many of which are around sustainability and assisting food desert parts of the U.S. Schools, though, are a particularly important territory. Especially in light of how the USDA recently changed some rules around school food, essentially weakening health standards.

As usual, it’s up to the non-profits of the world to offset a lack of change at the government level by launching programs that teach kids (and everyone else) the value of healthier eating. If more of these programs got support from growing restaurant companies like Sweetgreen, we might even be able to make the concept of fresh veggies appealing to more kids. As one 5th grader is quoted as saying on Sweetgreen’s site, “I thought broccoli was nasty. Not this broccoli. You do it right.”

Freight Farms Is Rearchitecting the Concept of Vertical Farming

Freight Farms helped invent the now-thriving farm-in-a-container market, where companies build vertical farms inside old shipping containers to grow pesticide-free produce throughout the year. But now that vertical farming companies are sprouting up almost as fast as the leafy greens they grow, the Boston, MA-based startup wants to completely rebuild the shipping container concept.

Its new product, The Greenery, which the company just announced today, isn’t a reiteration of its existing Leafy Green Machine (LGM). Instead, it’s a complete re-imagining of the shipping container concept that enables just about anyone to farm a large variety of crops. Or in the words of Freight Farms cofounder Brad McNamara, they’re “rearchitecting the whole vertical farm concept.”

To do that, McNamara and fellow cofounder Jon Friedman kept the foundational basics in play: farming still takes place inside a 40-foot shipping container and still involves the usual mix of hydroponics, LEDs, and software to control things like plant nutrients, temperature, and light levels. But inside the walls of that 40-foot container, Freight Farms has introduced some major changes.

One of the biggest tweaks is also one of the simplest: the inclusion of a racking system that’s actually movable. Since its founding in 2010, Freight Farms has used stainless steel vertical towers arranged in rows inside the shipping containers for growing. (SF-based Plenty employs a similar structure to its farms.) While this allows for much more growing space than in most vertical farms — which actually use horizontal rows of shelves — McNamara and Friedman saw a way to make the space inside the container even more productive by enabling customization.

With The Greenery, both the grow racks and the panels that hold the LEDs are now movable, so farmers can customize the layout inside the container based on the type and number of plants they grow. “In order to accommodate a larger variety of crops, rows can expand and contract,” Friedman explains of these mobile racks. For example, some plants are rooted, some grow on vines, and some simply need more space (e.g., tomatoes). Rather than having to grow plants according to what the space inside a container dictates, Greenery allows farmers to change the space based on what they need to grow.

A big impact on growth and yield is lights — that is, LEDs. But more LED power equals more electricity, which is financially constraining on companies and just all-around bad for sustainability. “Indoor agriculture has always struggled because you’re replacing the free resource of sun with lighting,” McNamara explains.

With The Greenery, Freight Farms addressed the lighting issue by redesigning the ropes of LEDs into panels that, according to the company, triples access to light and keep light energy from being wasted. McNamara and Friedman explained to me that the new lighting design produces a light intensity that’s 3x more powerful than its predecessor (the LGM) but doesn’t incur a 3x energy increase.

Arguably, though, the biggest improvement Freight Farms has made with The Greenery isn’t any one piece of technology, but the decision to bring all the tech in-house and build it themselves.

The typical vertical farm takes various off-the-shelf technologies, such as sensors, lighting, and hydroponics, and strings them together. The result is a farm that runs off fairly siloed elements that weren’t necessarily built to “talk” to one another, which can lead to interoperability issues, higher costs, and more time spent making sure these various systems work together. By contrast, the pieces at work in The Greenery were built with interoperability in mind, which in theory at least means a more reliable system and better control over the whole operation. Freight Farms also says it’s easier to automate the farming process with all the tech in-house, thereby making it simpler for anyone to use.

“It’s a turnkey offering in that no matter where you are in the world you can just pick up the instructions and go,” says Friedman. And because of that ease and lower costs, more populations can reap the benefits of vertical farming, including underserved ones most in need of easier access to fresh food. “This platform allows us the opportunity to not only feed a demographic and teach them how to farm,” says McNamara.

And while this vertically integrated vertical farm is a fairly new concept, Freight Farms isn’t the only one trying its hand at the idea. Over in the UK, the Future Farming Hub is attempting a similar one-stop-shop indoor farm, though their project doesn’t officially kick off until April of 2019. Even so, I expect we’ll see more companies in future exploring and offering vertically integrated systems.

Freight Farms currently operates in over 15 countries, including the Everlane factory in Vietnam and a Wendy’s location in Guam. According to Friedman, The Greenery will sell initially for $104,000. The company, meanwhile, plans to expand into new markets, particularly around the non-profit sector in order to help individuals and companies give back to their communities by making it easier and faster to get healthy, locally grown food.

CES 2019 Video: SeedSheet Launching Sensor for Idiot-Proof Home Gardens

Much as I love the idea of home gardening and picking fresh herbs from my windowsill to sprinkle over a pasta dish, anything I try to grow at home usually ends up dying within a few weeks. I either forget to water my plants, or else they perish due to weeds or lack of sunlight.

Maybe I should give Seedsheet a go. We wrote about this startup, which makes sheets that have pods of seeds embedded in a weed-blocking fabric, back in 2017, just a month after they got half a million bucks from Shark Tank investor Lori Greiner. Basically, it’s an idiot-proof garden.

And soon it will become even more easy to manage: in June, Seedsheet will launch a bluetooth sensor which you can stick in your Seedsheet-covered pot to give real-time data about ambient light, soil moisture, and more.

We caught up with Seedsheet CEO Cameron MacKugler on the CES floor to talk about what’s next for his company and the home gardening space in general. Give it a watch below:

The Spoon Talks to Seedsheet At CES 2019

One Year Later: We Check in with Verdical, Winner of the SKS2017 Startup Showcase

Last year indoor grow system Verdical beat our 14 other food innovation companies and took home the trophy at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) Startup Showcase. CEO Andrew Deitz pitched onstage about how Verdical’s indoor platform for hydroponic gardening would allow restaurants, hotels, cafeterias, and more to grow greens and herbs in their own kitchen, making fresh produce more accessible year-round while reducing food travel and waste.

When we left them last year, Verdical had just won a $10,000 cash prize and was gearing up to “revolutionize kitchens across the nation.” This week I checked in with Deitz to see where the startup is, one year on.

A Verdical grow system inside Jardiniere.

Customers
Verdical now has four customers, all in the Bay Area: Michelin-starred restaurant Jardiniere, 25-store pizza chain Pizza My Heart, the Marin Country Day School, and Berkeley dining spot Saha. All in all, there are 17 Verdical units currently in the field (so to speak).

Though he wouldn’t give details, Deitz also said that Verdical would soon be expanding outside the Bay Area with national — and even global — customers.

Like most other indoor grow systems on the market, Verdical currently offers just herbs and microgreens. This certainly limits what they can provide, but they’re experimenting within the boundaries. For example, at Jardiniere Verdical isn’t just growing garden-variety (ha) basil. Instead, they developed seed pods for things like gem marigold, wasabi mustard, and blue Ethiopian mustard. “We’re providing unique, highly-differentiated stuff that they couldn’t get other places, but can grow right here,” said Deitz.

Starting at $200 per month, customers get the Verdical hardware unit, all the plants they can grow, and access to the Verdical App that controls the growing platform, manages inventory, and provides education about new ingredients. According to Deitz, the price is cost neutral to the current herb and microgreen spend of their customers. Since Verdical works with everyone from a school to a Michelin-starred restaurant, I would imagine their monthly spend on microgreens and herbs varies pretty wildly, but Deitz said it’s actually surprisingly consistent.

Funding
This year Tabard VC, a food and agtech venture capital firm, invested an undisclosed amount in Verdical. Several angel investors have also funded the startup, though Deitz wouldn’t disclose details.

Partners
Verdical has teamed up with TE Connectivity, using the tech company’s sensors to monitor humidity, moisture, external temperature, water level, and water quality in their grow units. The two connected at the SKS last year and have been building a partnership together ever since. Verdical started using TE sensors in their early prototypes six months ago. “We helped them figure out how to better partner with startups,” said Deitz. “And they’re helping us figure out how to connect from the field all the way into somebody’s stomach.”

Verdical CEO Andrew Dietz with the TE Connectivity team at SKS 2018.

Competition

Since last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, quite a few companies have made strides to bring indoor grow systems to restaurants. Farmery also installs indoor hydroponic grow units in restaurants. Farmshelf recently put one of their hydroponic mini-farms in a New York Oath Pizza location. On a slightly larger scale, but Freight Farms installs and manages indoor farms in shipping containers for use in corporate cafeterias and more. And that’s not even taking into account companies working on residential or large-scale indoor farms.

While he wasn’t sure about the growing mechanics of other indoor farming systems, Deitz was confident that Verdical would distinguish itself from the pack with its agtech. “We’re innovative because we’re growing with a soil-based medium,” he explained. By harnessing the water purifying and nutrient delivery powers of soil, he claims they can grow produce more efficiently. He also told me that using soil is a safer bet than going with hydro or aquaponics: that way, even if there’s a power outage, the plants can still get what they need to survive.

Deitz, however, doesn’t think that on-site indoor farming is zero-sum game. “The market is so big, it’ll take us a while to bump into each other,” he said, referring to Verdical’s competitors.

What’s next?
According to Deitz, Verdical will soon be announcing new customers and expanded partnerships (we’ll keep you updated). But as they grow, the company will continue to focus on its original goal: connecting people to their food source. “That’s where you can see a shift in consciousness,” he said. Until then, if you’re in the Bay Area, drop in on one of Verdical’s restaurant customers and taste fresh-picked some exotic microgreens.

Freight Farms Unveils Onsite Vertical Farming Service

Your average institution, be it a schools, company, hospital, or university, typically doesn’t have the space or cash to consider an indoor farming initiative, even if it would mean putting fresher, more local greens into cafeterias and dining halls. That’s an issue Freight Farms looks to solve with the release of its new service Grown, which was just announced today.

The Boston, MA-based company is already known for its Leafy Green Machines, which are 40-square-foot shipping containers that hold vertical farms. These farms are climate controlled and use LEDs as well as a closed-loop hydroponic irrigation system to nurture crops throughout their entire lifecycle. Like most other vertical farming systems, the technology platform powering Freight Farms’ containers automates much of the work (and guesswork) of growing and harvesting greens.

Grown, unveiled today, is less product than service, as Freight Farms installs the Leafy Green Machine then manages the lifecycle of crops on an ongoing basis. Once the Machine, aka the shipping container with the farm inside, is installed, the customer doesn’t have to do much besides decide which crops to grow and what to do with the produce once its harvested (e.g., serve it in the company cafeteria). No additional staff (or land, for that matter) is needed, as Freight Farms monitors climate, water usage, and all other aspects of the indoor farming process. (This is different from, say, Freight Farms’ relationship with vertical farming startup Square Roots, who use the Leafy Green Machine but have their own farmers to care for the greens.)

The Grown package starts at $5,000/month, and includes replenishing supplies, maintenance, cleaning, 24/7 farm monitoring, and all farming operations, including seeding, transplanting, and harvesting. Customers can also add, for an extra fee, services like marketing and branding as well as on-campus educational programs.

Freight Farms already counts a few universities and several small-business farmers among its customers, and also has a presence in Europe. But they’re one of many in the indoor agriculture space, each with a slightly different focus. Agrylist raised $1.5 million earlier this year, though it’s focus is on larger farms (10,000 square feet up to five acres). Farmshelf brings smaller setups directly into restaurants and retail outlets. Crop One and Emirates Flight Catering are in the midst of building what they claim will be the world’s largest vertical farm.

The Grown service could really set Freight Farms apart, though, particularly if it manages to bring vertical farming and fresh greens into places it might not otherwise go, like schools or smaller companies. In fact, Freight Farms told The Spoon that a major focus right now is “the existing interest in on-site, year-round local sourcing methods especially in the school dining/university education sector.” So there’s also a real opportunity for a vertical farming company to align itself with a mission that’s about more than selling products at farmers markets to those with disposable income.

Consider the current initiatives to get more local, fresh produce into NYC public schools: Thanks to a non-profit called GrowNYC, over 50 percent of those public schools now have gardens. But accessing and using them depends in part on the weather, and as any New Yorker knows, the weather out here is horrible about half the time. By working with programs like GrowNYC, Freight Farms could theoretically expose an entirely new audience to vertical farming, not to mention provide them with year-round greens.

The company is already thinking in that direction. In the K–12 and higher education sectors, Freight Farms said they’ve seen a 63 percent increase “from those who strongly want to integrate the farms (to provide hyper-local produce for meals, as well as provide a great platform for education around nutrition and sustainability) – but haven’t had the capacity to do so.”

The launch of Grown has at least set on the discussion table the idea that we can expand our thinking around where and when everyone, not just tech employees, can get their hands on the kind of nutrition they need.