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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Business of Food

NovoNutrients Raises $4.7M to Complete Its Pilot Program for Alt-Protein Made from CO2 Inputs

NovoNutrients, a company that creates protein from CO2 inputs, today announced a $4.7 million fundraise to complete its industrial pilot program that will capture CO2 emissions from from oil, gas, and cement-related plants.

The round was led by Happiness Capital, a Hong Kong-based venture firm that has previously invested in Redefine Meat, Ynsect, and Beyond Meat. E2JDJ and Marinya Capital also joined the round, which included re-ups from SOSV’s IndieBio and the Grantham Environmental Trust. Other investors include Stanford Graduate School of Business Impact Fund, Purple Orange Ventures, and Joyance Partners.

NovoNutrients feeds the CO2 inputs it collects to naturally occurring microbes via a fermentation process. The resulting proteins have a variety of uses, including as ingredients in meat analogues as well as animal feeds. NovoNutrients says its protein can improve the amino acid profile of food products.

That nutrition element will work in NovoNutrients favor as it continues to develop its air protein and looks to scale production. At the recent IFT FIRST event, panelists suggested that while a lot of the focus in meat analogues right now is on taste and texture, the nutritional profile of proteins will become more important to consumers moving forward.  

Actually getting a product to consumers is still a ways off for NovoNutrients, however. For the time being, the company is focused on showing its fermentation tech can work at scale. The company will co-locate its bioreactors (aka fermentation tanks) at industrial sites that produce high levels of greenhouse gases. 

The pilot project is focused on a 1,000-liter bioreactor. NovoNutrients says it will stand up a 20,000-liter industrial demo in the near future. 

NovoNutrients is one of a few companies now developing novel protein from CO2, hydrogen, and other air inputs. Others include Air Protein, Solar Foods, and Deep Branch. Last year, the European Space Agency started working with Solar Foods to develop the technology for use in space to feed astronauts.

NovoNutrients said today that its pilot project will allow the company to start raising Series A funding later this year.  

DoorDash Expands Its Ghost Kitchen Operation in California

DoorDash has launched a new location of its ghost kitchen operation, the company announced today via a press release sent to The  Spoon. DoorDash Kitchens San Jose will house six different restaurant concepts from both nationally known restaurants and those from the San Francisco Bay Area. 

This is the second DoorDash Kitchens location. DoorDash launched the first almost two years ago in Redwood City, California, and has served the Peninsula area of the state ever since. The new location will offer delivery and pickup orders for customers in San Jose proper as well as Saratoga and Campbell.

Restaurants in the new location include Aria Korean Street Food, Canter’s Deli, Curry Up Now, Milk Bar, The Melt Express, and YiFang Taiwan Fruit Tea. Canter’s, in particular, is notable on this list because it illustrates how ghost kitchens can potentially improve a restaurant’s geographical reach. Canter’s is so famous in Los Angeles it’s practically an institution. It also only has one brick-and-mortar location, in Los Angeles, though in the last couple years it has expanded its reach in Southern California via a partnership with Kitchen United. Teaming up with DoorDash gives Canter’s a presence in Northern California without requiring the buildout of a full restaurant.

As part of the new facility, DoorDash has launched DoorDash Kitchens Full Service, where the delivery service assumes day-to-day operations like cooking and boxing up orders instead of requiring the restaurant to do so. That requires less work from the restaurants themselves, but it does place even more control over the brand in the hands of DoorDash. DoorDash has partnered with culinary operator A La Couch to hire cooking staff and prepare meals. The last mile, of course, will be handled exclusively by DoorDash and its own couriers. 

DoorDash said part of the motivation behind Full Service is to offer restaurants even less labor-intensive ways to run a delivery-only kitchen. And nowadays, it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, as many restaurants continue to struggle with high margins, a dearth of labor, and uncertain times in general. 

Full Service handles the hiring, training, and day-to-day tasks in the kitchen such as procurement and inventory management. Restaurants receive a portion of the revenue in return. A specific percentage was not given.

 

Forget Plants. Alt-Meat Needs More Mycoprotein

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Of the three pillars of alternative protein, plant-based is getting the most mainstream attention and cultivated meat is the currernt darling of VC investors. But fermentation may be the most practical in terms of both cost and scalability, and one area of that segment turning heads of late is mycoprotein. 

From an affordability and nutritional point of view, mycoprotein has a boatload of advantages over other forms of alternative protein — a point underscored this week when The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht profiled a company called Kernel Mycofoods. In their own words, the folks behind the Buenos Aires, Argentina-based company are currently on a mission to “make a product that [is] comparable without a price that will exclude the emerging markets.”

But Kernel isn’t the only company hoping to bring mycoprotein to the forefront, which makes now a good time to take a closer look into what this segment of fermentation is and why it matters to alternative protein.

Mycoprotein is a single-cell protein made from a naturally occurring filamentous fungus called fusarium venenatum. To get mycoprotein, fungi spores are fermented alongside glucose in fermentation tanks in a process similar to that of brewing beer. The entire operation produces a pasty, doughy texture that resembles a chicken breast. 

Up to now, the most well-known application of mycoprotein is as the main ingredient of Quorn’s meat analogues. But as noted above, several other companies are now getting recognition for their use of mycoprotein as an alternative to traditional meat. That list includes Kernel Mycofoods as well as Better Meat Co., which opened its production facility last month, and food giant Unilever. The latter is producing a mycoprotein called Abunda through a partnership with Scottish company Enough. 

Experts say mycoprotein is high in fiber, low in sodium, has an inherently meaty texture, and is rich in amino acids. Kernel, for example, says its mycoprotein has a higher protein digestibility-corrected amino acid score than beef, soy, or wheat gluten.

Mycoprotein falls into the “biomass fermentation” category, as opposed to traditional or precision fermentation (though the lines between all three can be blurred). Because of this, its biggest advantage compared to other forms of alt-protein is its ability to scale at a lower price point. The Good Food Institute noted in its 2020 State of the Industry report on fermentation that biomass fermentation offers “well-established examples of scalability and cost reduction suitable for alternative protein applications.” 

Mycoprotein specifically has a number of other advantages. 

Versatility is a big one. Mycoprotein can be used on its own, as Quorn does with it, or it can be blended with traditional meat to enhance the latter’s flavor and nutritional profile. For example, it could reduce the amount of cholesterol found in a traditional burger patty.

Mycoprotein also already has an established track record, having been approved for use in food products in the early 1980s. That point alone suggests companies won’t face the same types of regulatory hurdles they do with, say, cultured meat. 

And as an alternative to plant-based meat analogues like those of Beyond and Impossible, mycoprotein is a potentially much more eco-friendly operation since it doesn’t require land to grow plants or significant amounts of downstream processing to get the meaty texture consumers want.

Of all these things, though, nutrition might just be the main driver behind mycoprotein. Citing panelists at the recent IFT FIRST event, Food Navigator recently reported that “consumers increasingly want products that are nutritionally comparable to or better for them than animal protein – something the current industry is not fully delivering.” The “current industry” in this case are plant-based analogues from the likes of Beyond and Impossible, companies that talk at length about elements like texture and mouthfeel but very little about their products nutritional profiles. Nutrition will, according to IFT FIRST panelists, be the “disrupting” factor in the near term when it comes to alternative proteins.

All of those factors mean mycoprotein could well become the breakout star of the alt-protein sector by the end of the year.

More Headlines

Plant-Based Cheese Company Nobell Foods Raises $75M – The company will use the new funds to commercialize its first plant-based cheese products, including mozzarella, which the company makes from soybeans that are genetically edited to produce casein. 

Bezos-Backed NotCo Raises $235M for Plant-Based Alternatives – This new capital will allow NotCo to expand into new product categories in North America and scale its proprietary A.I. platform. 

Redefine Meat Launches 5 “New Meat” Plant-Based Proteins in Israel – Plant-based meat company Redefine Meat announced five new products are now available at select Israeli restaurants and hotels. 

 

 

AppHarvest Gets $91M in New Financing for Its High-Tech Indoor Farms

AppHarvest this week announced a $91 million financing arrangement with Equillibrium Capital, according to Food Navigator, who broke the news. The money will go towards AppHarvest’s previously stated goal of building out 12 high-tech indoor farming facilities by 2025.

Equilibrium Capital’s $91 million figure is a construction loan that will support the building of AppHarvest’s forthcoming 60-acre facility in Richmond, Kentucky. The Richmond location is almost identical to the company’s 60-acre high-tech greenhouse in Morehead, Kentucky, which is already operational and shipping different varieties of tomato to grocery retailers within a day’s drive. 

Three more farms in Kentucky are already under construction, too: two 15-acre facilities that will grow leafy greens in Berea and Morehead, respectively, and a 30-acre facility in Somerset for growing strawberries. 

The farms use or will use a mix of hydroponics, sensors, supplemental LED lighting, automation and AI as well as natural inputs like sunlight and rainwater to grow produce. AppHarvest is also adding more technology to its operations. It acquired harvesting robot startup Root AI in April of this year for $60 million, and CTO Josh Lessing (formerly the CEO of Root AI) has said AppHarvest is investing in robotics, artificial intelligence, teleoperation, and proprietary seed genetics. Its intelligent robot, Virgo, for example, is currently learning to manage crops and make decisions about growing decisions. All that tech, of course, means more data that has the potential to improve growing processes, crop yield, and food quality.

AppHarvest went public earlier this year via a SPAC merger with Novus Capital Corp for $475 million.

Delivery Hero’s Sustainable Packaging Program to Provide Restaurants With Eco-Friendly To-Go Containers

Delivery Hero today launched its Sustainable Packaging Program that gives restaurants on its platform more eco-friendly options for their to-go orders. The concept is currently piloting in Austria, Chile, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Qatar, and Singapore. Delivery Hero said in today’s announcement that it will expand the program to other markets in the near future.

The company will deploy 10 million units of “sustainable packaging” by the end of 2022. Specifically, that means providing packaging that’s either fully plant based or plastic alternatives that are free of perfluoroalkoxy-alkanes (PFAS), the manmade chemicals frequently used to make grease- and liquid-resistant packaging. 

For its eco-friendly packaging, Delivery Hero is collaborating with Eco-Products and BIO-LUTIONS on various products including boxes, compartment containers, salad bowls, soup bowls, and sauce containers. (Delivery Hero invested in BIO-LUTIONS in 2019.) These will, according to the company, be available to restaurants on the Delivery Hero platform at “affordable pricing.” 

Several efforts over the last year or so have seen restaurants and restaurant-related companies address the industry’s packaging (aka trash) problem. Major QSRs like McDonald’s and Burger King have both piloted reusable container programs, while parts of the U.S. have companies like DeliverZero, which works with restaurants to bring reusable containers to the delivery process.

Delivery Hero’s news is notable because up to now, no major delivery service has announced plans to actually take over the responsibility of finding and providing eco-friendly packaging. Normally, this task is up to the restaurants themselves. Especially given the last year, many smaller businesses do not have access to affordable options that aren’t mainstream plastics. Delivery Hero, meanwhile, operates 13 subsidiaries, in addition to its name brand, all over the world, so its potential impact could be huge. Company co-founder and CEO Niklas Östberg said in a statement today that the Sustainable Packaging Program “aspires to pave the way for the industry and deliver a more climate friendly service for customers and communities around the world.”

The program follows the company’s earlier announcement of becoming carbon neutral by the end of 2021. 

If you want to learn more about Delivery Hero and other happenings in the restaurant world, join The Spoon on August 17 for a virtual Restaurant Tech Summit. The day-long event will discuss the digitization of the restaurant industry and what that means for its players. Grab a ticket here, and come ready to ask some questions.

Notch Raises $10M to Digitize the Restaurant Supply Chain

Canadian restaurant supply chain tech company Notch has closed a $10 million round of financing led by Accomplice and BDC, bringing its total funding to date to nearly $20 million. MATH Venture Partners, Golden Ventures, The Yield Lab, Garage Capital, and Plexo Capital also participated, as did several angel investors.

The Toronto-based company wants to use the new funds to bring more restaurants and distributors online when it comes to the food supply chain. Notch’s software, available via either an iOS or Android app, provides a central place for restaurant operators and managers to view and manage all of their suppliers and shipments, create inventory lists, compare prices across different suppliers, and digitize invoicing and bookkeeping, among other tasks. 

Restaurant distributors can use the Notch Connect product to set up and run digital storefronts as well as manage invoicing and accept digital payments from restaurants. 

Until recently, Notch went by the name ChefHero and focused largely on providing a marketplace to connect buyers and sellers in the restaurant foods supply chain. Largely spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the restaurant industry, the company revamped and rebranded earlier this year to its current name and form. 

Notch said today that this financing round will also help it expand its geographic reach to more parts of North America. In addition to Toronto, the company operates in Chicago, Illinois and in Texas.

Back-of-house and back-office companies in general are receiving more funding of late as restaurants look to cut more costs and make their businesses more organized/efficient. Notch’s news today follows recent funding announcements from Zenput ($27 million), Choco ($100 million), and 86 Repairs ($7.3 million).

Notch is also in the midst of developing Notch Pay, which when finished will function as an automated payment and collection tool for both restaurants and distributors. Currently, those tasks are done via Notch Connect.

InFarm Plots a Major Retail Expansion Across Canada

InFarm is partnering with Sobeys, one of the largest food retailers in Canada, to sell its vertically grown greens in grocery stores across the country. The Berlin, Germany-based indoor agriculture company plans to be in an additional four of 10 Canadian provinces by 2023. The deal will place InFarm in over 1,000 retail locations across Canada.

InFarm’s original entry into Canada happened in March 2020, when the company brought its small, pod-like modular farms to Sobeys stores, Thrifty Foods, and Safeway Canada, all subsidiaries of the Empire Company. These smaller farms can be placed directly in the produce section of a grocery store or nearby, making it possible for retailers to harvest greens onsite and sell them directly to consumers faster.  

For InFarm, this most recently announced expansion also means constructing more of its InFarm Growing Centers, which the company says are “growth, production and distribution hubs” that also hold high-capacity vertical farms. The company first announced these centers at the beginning of 2021, saying it had 15 of them either planned or under construction across major urban centers.

Modularity is the underlying principle behind both the pod farms in produce sections and the larger Growing Centers. The size of these farms can change depending on where they are located. As InFarm CEO Erez Galonska told The Spoon earlier this month, this modularity allows the company to respond to demand faster in any given area since it takes less time to launch a smaller farm compared to some of the industrial-sized operations out there. “If you think of larger-scale farms, they require a lot of upfront investment and can take some time to set up,” he said. “We took a modular approach to help address this, reducing the amount of cash needed to start operations and speeding up the process.”

In today’s announcement, InFarm said that its new deal with Sobeys comes in response to demand, and that it will increase production volume in Canada by sevenfold. New Growing Centers are planned for Calgary, Halifax, and Winnipeg. A site in Hamilton, Ontario will eventually host InFarm’s largest Growing Center in North America.  

Over the next five years, InFarm plans to expand its selection of produce to include tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, mushrooms, salads and potted plants. The company plans to have 100 growing centers in operation by 2025.

Data: Restaurant Tech’s Biggest Opportunity

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As online ordering becomes more the norm, the next step in on the path to digitization is all about data. More specifically, it is about making sense of the mountains of customer data brought about by the uptick in digital ordering. Think customer order history, dietary preferences, as well as external data like weather, nearby events, and other factors that could impact restaurant traffic.

A company that wants to help restaurants make sense of all this is Brightloom. 

Until relatively recently, Brightloom went by the name Eatsa, and for a time was a restaurant itself, pushing whole hyper-digitized, automated-dining concept long before major QSRs started adopting cubbies and kiosks. The Eatsa restaurant itself didn’t last terribly long. In fact, the company started shuttering these locations in 2017 and by the end of that year was licensing its automated-restaurant technology out to others instead of trying to own the whole stack.

In 2019, rebranded as Brightloom and pivoted sharply away from automated ordering tech to what CEO Adam Brotman refers to as a “data driven personalization service.” Instead of providing cubbies and online order systems for the restaurant front of house, Eatsa now provides a “customer growth” platform through which restaurants can access and analyze their data.

Brotman told me this past spring that the reason for the shift was that digital ordering “was becoming some[thing] of a commodity.” Even before the pandemic shut dining rooms down and forced more restaurants to rely on off-premises channels like pickup and delivery, businesses were incorporating more ways for customers to order digitally. All those order channels — apps, websites, even SMS — produce data that, with the right tools, can be extremely valuable to restaurants in terms of being able to offer customers relevant experiences and upsells.

Boston Consulting Group notes that one-third of restaurants’ digital customers ordered online for the first time during the pandemic. That number is expected to go up, and restaurants will have to meet that demand. “Going digital” nowadays means being able to message and connect with restaurant customers directly, knowing what they buy from how, how often they’re buying it, and through which channels. 

“Even just having a great looking website or mobile app is not easy. Organizing your data and doing data driven, personalized marketing, on your email and push notifications, that is even harder,” Brotman said. 

Brightloom addresses those types of areas for restaurants, and the company has recently seen its popularity among restaurants grow. The company claimed in a press release this month that restaurants using the Brightloom platform “experienced lifts in revenue per guest of 5.7% or more across 23 million guests.” The company has also added larger-name chains, such as Ruby Tuesday and El Pollo Loco, to its roster of customers. Finally, Brightloom also recently launched Brightloom Pro, which includes more customization capabilities for individual restaurant brands. 

Food tech investor Brita Rosenheim recently noted that it’s “dizzying” for restaurant operators to make decisions around how to use their data. Because of that, there is a tremendous opportunity for restaurant tech companies that can partner with these restaurants  to help them “utilize customer data to better uphold their brand, funnel customers into more profitable channels, and make better decisions about merchandising, pricing, and promotions.”

If you want to learn more about this brave new data-centric restaurant world, join The Spoon and guests on August 17 for a virtual Restaurant Tech Summit. Brightloom and Adam Brotman will join the likes of Olo, Delivery Hero, Wow Bao, and many other restaurants and restaurant tech companies. Grab a ticket here, and come ready to ask some questions. 

More Headlines

Bbot Raises $15M Series A for its Restaurant Ordering and Payment Software – The company said it will create new POS and loyalty program integrations with the new funds, and will focus on features for food halls and virtual brands. 

Delivery Service Swiggy Raises $1.25B – The “heavily oversubscribed” round includes the $800 million the India-based delivery service raised earlier this year.

Zenput Raises $27M to Manage Operations for Multi-Unit Restaurants – Multi-unit restaurant operators, grocery stores, and convenience stores can release new operating procedures and health and safety protocols and enforce them across all units. 

Domino’s Used More Tech to Address Labor Challenges in Q2

For Domino’s, combatting the restaurant industry’s current labor shortage means adopting more tech to make operating procedures more efficient. Speaking on this week’s earnings call, CEO Ritch Allison said his company is “absolutely working on technologies and operating procedures to help us run our stores more efficiently, and with less labor.”

One major development relates to the delivery drivers themselves. Allison noted that Domino’s is currently “trying to take a lot of things off of their plates that cause them to do anything other than being in a car, delivering a pizza or on a bike, delivering a pizza to a customer.” A non-tech example he mentions is removing the task of pre-folding pizza boxes from their workload. More than 2,000 Domino’s locations in the U.S. no longer use this method, which frees up delivery drivers’ time. 

More tech-related are the efforts Domino’s has made around integrating more GPS software to its processes and making it available to drivers on their own phones. Allison said that in the “old days,” it might take a driver two to three months to really learn a geographic area and be able to navigate it quickly and without mistakes. GPS speeds up this process.

The company started expanding its GPS-tracking system back in 2019. As time has moved on and third-party delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats have gotten bigger, GPS has become a priority for Domino’s partly as a way to stay as fast and efficient as those services. 

Allison also noted on the call that Domino’s is now using machine learning to predict sales at a store and “more appropriately matching the number of team members at the store at the times when we need them.”

Despite staffing issues this past quarter, Domino’s second-quarter U.S. sales were up 3.5 percent. International sales were up by double digits. International sales were up by double digits. “COVID’s strong sales, the accelerating economic growth and ongoing government stimulus continue to result in one of the most difficult staffing environments that we’ve seen in a long time.”

He added that in addition to the above changes, Domino’s expects to see some wage increases in the future, too. 

Plant-Based Cheese Company Nobell Foods Raises $75M

Plant-based cheesemaker Nobell Foods announced a $75 million Series B fundraise and launched out of stealth mode this week.

The round was led by investment group Breakthrough Energy Ventures and included participation from new investors Hillhouse Capital Group and Footprint Coalition. Existing investors AgFunder, Andreesen Horowitz, Mission Bay Capital, Fifty Years, New Crop Capital, Germin8 Ventures, former Muse frontman Matt Bellamy, and Pear VC also took part. Nobell has now raised $100 million in total, according to Fast Company, which was first to report the news.

Nobell will use the new funds to commercialize its first plant-based cheese products, including mozzarella, which the company makes from soybeans that are genetically edited to produce casein. Casein, a protein unique to milk, is a major contributor to the texture, taste, and melt-a-bility of cheese. It’s also an element most plant-based cheeses out there lack, which is why so many fall short of the mark when it comes to adequately mimicking the real thing. 

Nobell effectively trains soybeans to produce this casein. The company has been quietly developing this method for the last four years, and says it could wind up being cheaper than the costs of producing cheese using cow’s milk. 

Cheese comes with a heavy environmental footprint. As demand for dairy has increased, so too has the percentage of global emissions the sector produces. Cheese, in particular, is highly resource intensive. 

There are many, many plant-based cheese options out there. Most of them can’t replicate the taste, texture, and mouthfeel of dairy-based cheese yet, largely because they don’t contain the aforementioned casein.

However, Nobell isn’t quite the only company out there producing the protein from alternative sources, though it’s the only one using plants for the process. A company called New Culture uses genetically modified microbes like yeast to produce casein, training these microbes to make the protein. Alt-dairy company Perfect Day also uses genetically modified microbes. 

In a statement on the Nobell website, founder Magi Richani says that cheese is “the last frontier, the insurmountable thing” most consumers won’t get up. With Nobell, she aims to ensure these consumers don’t have to give it up and can still enjoy, stretchy, melty, tasty cheese without further compromising the health of the planet.  

Bbot Raises $15M Series A for its Restaurant Ordering and Payment Software

Restaurant ordering and payment processing platform Bbot announced today that it has raised a $15 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by CRV and follows a $4 million extension to its Seed round the company raised in January of this year. Bbot’s total amount of funding is now $22.3 million.

Broadly speaking, Bbot helps restaurants, bars, hotels, ghost kitchens and other hospitality establishments add in-venue and online ordering. The company offers a range of hardware tools such as tablets, scanners and printer controls, as well as a suite of software to enable contactless and online ordering and manage catering.

Bbot’s system uses QR codes, which restaurants can place on tables and customers can scan with their own phones to pull up the menu, order, and pay for items. While the QR code-based ordering isn’t new, it has gained much more attention over the last year because of its inherently contactless nature. In her recent 2021 Restaurant Tech EcoSystem market map, Brita Rosenheim predicted that these type of tools will become more important to restaurants, writing:

Stateside, we’ve increasingly been adopting mobile-first ordering and marketing strategies, but the mobile-only approach (often seen in Asia) wasn’t widely embraced before the pandemic. Now, whether via QR codes, apps or mobile web, there has been a huge shift towards mobile-optimized menus, ordering and payments which eliminate or reduce most employee/customer contact. This can help to improve the guest experience via increased speed and fewer errors. For fine dining, this also saves time/costs in printing and sourcing supplies for paper menus.

Bbot is just the latest bit of restaurant tech funding we’ve seen over the past month. 86 Repairs raised $7.3 million for its restaurant machine maintenance and repair service. Choco raised a whopping $100 million to digitize the relationship between restaurants and food suppliers. And Zenput raised $27 million to help multi-unit restaurants widely release and enforce operating procedures and health and safety protocols.

In its press announcement, Bbot said it has added more than 700 customers and reached 85 employees across 14 states over the last year. With its new funding, Bbot said it will create new POS and loyalty program integrations, and will focus on features for food halls and virtual brands. The company also plans to launch a self-service Bbot app store, so developers can integrate their apps with Bbot’s existing platform.

InFarm Bets on Modular for the Future of CEA Growing

Much of the recent news (and investment dollars) in vertical farming has centered on massive, stationary plant factories that produce pounds of leafy greens in the millions. 

Bucking this norm — and possibly building a new one for indoor agriculture in the process — is a company called InFarm. Those that follow indoor ag developments closely will be familiar with the name, and may even have purchased greens at one of the stores where the company keeps its farms.

The Berlin, Germany-based company, founded in 2013, has long been known for its small, pod-like hydroponic farms it installs in grocery stores in restaurants. Greens can be harvested onsite — a major advantage when it comes to leafy greens, which are delicate and often get harmed during shipping and distribution. These mini-farms are currently in a few hundred locations around the world.

Earlier this year, the company also launched the first of a planned 15 InFarm Growing Center facilities. Each of these will produce the equivalent of 10,000 square meters of farmland, which is 1 hectare or about 2.47 acres in traditional farmland.  

Modularity is a key component of both concepts, as is the idea of a decentralized network of farms that share data with a main hub. Right now, the norm for vertical farming tends towards large, warehouse-sized farms that are stationary and can therefore only serve certain regions. Typically, companies like West Coast-based Plenty or AeroFarms in the Northeast and Kalera in the South distribute their greens to grocery retailers within a certain distance, usually no more than one day’s drive. If these companies want to expand to new markets, another lengthy construction must be planned and executed.

InFarm’s pods don’t go up overnight, but as CEO Erez Galonska explained to The Spoon recently, the company can respond more quickly to demand in any given area because of the pods’ modular design. For example, a farm might be built and operating within six weeks, versus eighteen months for a larger, less mobile build like those of other vertical farm companies.

Size-wise, InFarm’s units are anywhere between 30 and 100 feet tall. At maximum capacity, they can produce more than 500,000 plants per year. For now, crops are largely in the leafy greens space, though InFarm did recently say it is expanding its crop capabilities to mushrooms, tomatoes, and chilis. Galonska says the company has more than 75 products, and eventually wants “to fulfill our ultimate goal of offering the whole vegetable and fruit baskets.”

Leafy greens require fewer inputs (water, energy) than other vegetables to grow, which is one of the reasons they’re such a popular crop. And as was recently explained by World Wildlife Fund, energy consumption is still a major hurdle (among others) for indoor farming, and one reason the sector hasn’t moved far beyond leafy greens.

Collecting more data on plant growth and optimal growing conditions could help companies like InFarm eventually lower costs. It’s one of the reasons we see more and more indoor farming companies now talk about their “network,” where all farms are connected to the same network and feed data on plant growth back to the main system. InFarm’s units connect to the company’s HQ via the cloud and generate billions of data points that inform InFarm research and production. 

“The most important factor is the quantity and quality of the data that we are able to collect and generate insights from,” says Galonska. “Embedded in each and every one of our farms are more than 75 lab-grade sensors. Using hyperspectral cameras and scanning lasers, we track growth speed, photosynthesis activity and stress responses of our crops, giving real time biofeed back to how our plants are doing.”

He adds that his company has seen an 82 percent reduction in unit costs since 2018 and a 240 percent improvement in yield. The challenge, of course, will be continuing to get those gains as the company widens its crop varieties outside of the leafy green realm.

Galonska agrees that vertical farming is still a fairly capital-intensive business, which is another reason InFarm has chosen a de-centralized network for its business. “If you think of larger-scale farms, they require a lot of upfront investment and can take some time to set up,” he says. “We took a modular approach to help address this, reducing the amount of cash needed to start operations and speeding up the process.”