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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Vertical Farming

Plenty’s New Vertical Farm To Produce 4.5M Pounds of Leafy Greens From a Single City Block

Today indoor ag startup Plenty announced what it claims is the world’s most advanced vertical farm. Located in Compton, California, the company says the farm is designed to yield up to 4.5 million pounds of leafy greens annually, occupying just a city block’s worth of space.

Unlike most other vertical farms that grow produce on flat planes, Plenty’s 3D system uses vertical towers nearly two stories high, which it claims allows them to yield up to 350 times that of a conventional farm.

The company also uses robotics in nearly every step of the process, from planting to harvest. You can see the system in action in the video below:

Plenty Farm Waltz Tour

“After investing nearly a decade into research and development, ​​Plenty has cracked the code on a scalable platform for indoor farming,” said Plenty CEO Arama Kukutai. “With Plenty’s first commercial farm, we’re proving that our uniquely vertical indoor farms can deliver a reliable, year-round supply of fresh produce with positive unit economics.”

The company’s emphasis on unit economics makes sense, particularly in light of the struggles of the vertical farming industry over the past year. High upfront capital expenditures have made it difficult for companies like App Harvest to stay afloat, which means investors are increasingly focused on high-volume production of margin-positive produce going forward.

The opening of a high-tech farm in Compton is a milestone for a city with historically high poverty and unemployment. The city’s mayor, Emma Sharif, emphasized over 30% of the farm’s employees hail from Compton during the announcement.

“Plenty’s farm can serve as a model for improving access to fresh, locally grown food for urban populations while fostering cities’ economic growth,” said Sharif.

According to Plenty, the Compton Farm grows four types of leafy greens: Baby Arugula, Baby Kale, Crispy Lettuce, and Curly Baby Spinach. Plenty says the Curly Baby Spinach is one of the world’s only vertically grown, pesticide-free spinach products.

Plenty’s leafy greens can be found in Northern and Southern California locations, including Bristol Farms, Northern California Whole Foods Market stores, and local grocers in Compton and Southern California Walmart stores. Plenty’s greens are also featured as a meal ingredient on Singapore Airlines flights from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).

Japan Vertical Farm Pioneer Spread Hits 100 Million Lettuce Serving Milestone

While the vertical farming industry in the US continues to struggle, longtime Japanese precision agriculture pioneer Spread continues to pump out heads of lettuce in its fifteen years in operation, hitting the 100 million pack milestone this year. The company, which raised $30 million in funding last year, sells its produce in approximately 5,000 retail stores, as well as food service and ready-made meal operators across Japan, according to a release sent to The Spoon.

The company’s founder, Shinji Inada, started the company in 2007 after a career in fresh produce distribution, citing a concern about a decrease in agriculture production due to climate change. While vertical farming has been around in Japan since the 1980s, Inada noticed that neither the quality nor price of “plant factory” produce was on par with traditionally farmed agriculture, so he developed a vertical farm system to produce his lettuce brand called Vegetus.

Since then, his company has continued developing its vertical farming technology and launched its Techno Farm concept in 2018, which uses automated cultivation, precise environmental control technology, and an IoT-based cultivation management system called ‘Techno Farm Cloud.’ The company’s TechoFarm system is used in three locations today: Techno Farm Fukuroi, Techno Farm Narita, and Techno Farm Keihanna.

Since its fundraise last year, the company has been exploring expansion into strawberries and the production of plant-based meat. The company has also been expanding its selection of lettuce varieties, launching a ” Chigiri ” product in 2021, which has its leaves removed during production, and launching a new European lettuce variety, “Stick,” this spring.

Vertical Farmer Oishii Doubles Down on Unique Japanese Varietals With the Introduction of the Koyo

Vertical farming startup Oishii has introduced another strawberry cultivar, The Koyo Berry, which will join the brand’s Omakase Berry offering introduced in 2018.

The Koyo Berry is a Japanese varietal grown outside Tokyo during winter. The berries will be grown first in Oishii’s east coast vertical farms, which use advanced robotics and traditional Japanese farming methods to produce the fruit. The Koyo Berry will be available through online grocer FreshDirect in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut for $15 MSRP per tray. The product is expected to expand to other markets, including Los Angeles, later this year.

Oishii introduced its first strawberry, the Omakase Berry, in 2018. Oishii founder and CEO Hiroki Koga decided, when building out his vertical farm, to attempt to replicate the elements of a perfect day in Japan (e.g., humidity levels, light) inside a controlled-environment farm in the U.S. This allows the company to grow the Omakase – and now the Koyo – Berry 365 days per year.

The company operates three indoor vertical farms, two outside Manhattan and one in Los Angeles. Oishii recently opened Mugen Farm, a 74,000-square-foot facility that relies on advanced robotics combined with traditional Japanese farming methods. The company claims its newest farm uses 60% less energy and 40% less water than first-generation vertical farms.

Outwardly, Oishii appears to be doing just fine, contrasting with other vertical farms struggling financially. The company’s choice of pursuing unique, high-end produce, such as Japanese strawberry varietals that are not widely available in the U.S., looks to have been a smart strategic move. Oishii has gained lots of viral attention, and its Omakase strawberries are selling for as much as $50 for a box of 11 online. It’s also being sold in Whole Foods Market and other grocery stores at prices ranging from $6 to $20 MSRP depending on the tray size.

Now, with the debut of the Koyo, Oishii gives tastemakers another rare strawberry to pay top dollar for.

IKEA Tests Vertical Farms in Partnership With InFarm

Furniture retail giant IKEA is trialing vertical farm installations at three locations in Germany, according to an announcement made by Infarm. Customers at IKEA locations in Kaarst, Duisburg, and Munich-Eching will be able to watch the Infarm installation grow dill, curly parsley, and Italian basil in-store starting this week. According to the announcement, the herbs will be used in food served inside the store’s restaurant.

“Infarm’s concept convinced us because we can make the topics of sustainability and healthy eating tangible for our employees and customers in a prominent place in our furniture stores,” said Tanja Schramm, Country Food Manager IKEA Germany. 

It’s an interesting partnership given how much influence IKEA has in consumer furniture trends and retail. By showing off how they can use in-store farm systems to grow food for consumption in-store, IKEA could potentially encourage other retailers to embrace precision grow systems on-site.

That said, the news would be a lot more interesting if this signaled a potential push by the retailer to position vertical farming systems as a new category for consumers. The company has dabbled previously with its VÄXER/KRYDDA hydroponic systems, but unfortunately, the company has since discontinued those products.

But who knows? Maybe with others beginning to launch new kitchen systems designed around sustainable eating, this news signals that IKEA is starting to look for new ways to encourage consumers to embrace hyperlocal and tech-powered food production.

After Going Public via SPAC, Controlled Environment Ag Specialist Local Bounti Looks to Disrupt the Produce Business

After Going Public, Indoor Farming Company Local Bounti Rings the New York Stock Exchange Bell

Most of the tech-focused indoor agriculture startups The Spoon covers have raised private funding rounds from investors as they scale up and expand. Local Bounti, a Montana-based controlled environment agriculture company, has charted a different course when it comes to raising capital.

Through a reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), Local Bounti went public in November. Co-CEO Craig Hurlbert rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange last week, celebrating Local Bounti’s emergence as a publicly traded company. It’s a milestone that reflects what makes the company stand out in the indoor farming space: a practical, somewhat old-school focus on business economics.

Hurlbert and his co-CEO Dr. Travis Joyner originally entered the indoor farming space as co-founders of a private equity firm seeking to invest in a controlled environment agriculture startup. But as Hurlbert and Joyner looked into existing companies, they saw an opportunity to create something unique.

“We came from the energy space, where unit economics is everything, and we thought we could bring that to the industry,” Hurlbert told The Spoon over Zoom last week. So they founded Local Bounti, aiming to build a unique CEA organization with a built-in focus on unit economics.

Local Bounti’s uses a patent-pending “stack and flow” growing system, which Hurlbert described as a hybrid of greenhouse and vertical farming. According to Hurlbert, the flexibility of the system should allow the company to expand its current catalog of eight profitable SKUs to over 30. The company estimates that its system uses 90% less land and water to grow its greens than it would take to produce the same output via conventional agriculture.

Since Local Bounti’s founding in 2018, the company has attracted some big-name investors, including Cargill and BNP Paribas. Hurlbert said that the team’s focus on unit economics helped to draw in those investors.

According to Hurlbert, Cargill also developed an interest in Local Bounti because the legacy agriculture corporation is taking note of increasing demand for environmentally friendly produce: “Cargill’s customers have been coming to them and saying, ‘We want to focus on a more sustainably grown, cleaner product that’s better for our end consumers.’ And that’s why they started looking at the CEA space.”

Cargill’s relationship with Local Bounti is three-pronged: The legacy agriculture corporation has invested on the equity side, contributed to Local Bounti’s $200 million debt facility, and helped the company to establish partnerships with its own customers.

Last year, though, Local Bounti’s leadership decided to depart from the normal capital-raising route. “We already know we have a differentiated technology. We know what our facility can do,” Hurlbert said. “It’s now time to balance the technology with capitalization so we can really get out there and make our mark.”

So Local Bounti completed a merger with Leo Holdings III Corp., a publicly-traded special purpose acquisition company, last month. Local Bounti is now trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “LOCL.”

“I’m so happy for the whole team that we were able to achieve this,” Hulbert said, reflecting on ringing the opening bell at the stock exchange. “And really, the finish line to the deal is the starting line to the company. So we’ve got a weekend to celebrate, and then we’ll get out there Monday morning and really go about the disruption process.”

On the retail side, Local Bounti has partnered with Idaho-based grocery chain Albertsons to get its products to consumers. The company has placed its products in about 100 Albertsons stores throughout the Intermountain West, and hopes to expand the relationship.

The company also has big plans when it comes to brand-building. “I would encourage you to go to the grocery store, look in the produce section, and ask yourself if there’s a brand there that you connect with,” Hurlbert said. He doubts that the answer will be yes — but he thinks that Local Bounti can change that with the expertise of CMO Josh White, formerly CMO at Chobani.

When it comes to the big picture for controlled environment agriculture, Hurlbert believes it’ll only take some time and consumer education to develop a loyal base of buyers: “I think when the consumer gets complete transparency about this product — how it affects the environment, how long it’ll last in their refrigerator — they’ll never go back.”

Soli Organic Announces $120 Million in New Financing to Expand Indoor Soil-Based Farms

Virginia-based indoor growing company Soli Organic announced last week that it has entered a $120 million financing arrangement with real estate firm Decennial Group. This new partnership will help the company in its plans to expand with eight new farms, each with the capacity to grow 5 million pounds of produce per year.

Soli was founded in 1989 as Shenandoah Growers, a conventional agriculture company based in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley region. The Decennial Group partnership and expansion is an important milestone in the company’s transition to all-indoor production.

While many controlled environment agriculture companies are using hydroponic and aeroponic technologies to facilitate indoor growth, Soli is using a soil-based system. This August, that proprietary technology won the Agtech Breakthrough award for Sunless Production System of the Year.

The company says that its soil-based, LED-powered approach has helped it to achieve lower unit costs for organic produce than either conventional farming or other indoor growing methods. One of the big selling points for controlled environment agriculture is that the developing body of technologies could make healthy food more accessible to all—and Soli’s success in bringing down costs suggests that the industry may be able to keep that promise.

Using its soil-based system, Soli is focusing on minimizing water and energy use. “Our organic soil, 95% of which is recycled back into our system after use, is an ideal growing medium for crops due to its slow release of water, with crops controlling uptake based on their need,” a company representative told The Spoon via email. “As a reflection of our ‘biology first’ philosophy, we are also controlling environmental factors, such as leaf temperature, relative humidity, CO2 and light, to optimize the plants’ efficiency in water uptake.”

The company is also working to optimize its LED lighting systems to conserve energy, and using wind and solar power at some locations.

Soli has already broken ground on its first new construction, which will be located in Anderson County, S.C. The company expects the facility to be operational by the second quarter of 2022, and to create 50 local jobs. The locations of the other facilities have yet to be announced.

The company has also been taking steps to boost the commercial reach of its products (which include herbs, leafy greens, and microgreens) by staffing its c-suite with executives from big-name food brands. In June, former Starbucks CMO Matthew Ryan stepped up as the company’s new CEO, while former Postmates SVP Mike Buckley became CFO.

“My career has been shaped and defined by innovative, market-leading companies. Here, the opportunity for growth could be even greater, as Shenandoah Growers is uniquely positioned to deliver against the converging demand for affordable, high-quality and organic produce, and the need to grow it sustainably and reliably,” said Ryan in a press release on the leadership changes.

It’ll be interesting to see how Soli’s combination of proprietary growing technology, legacy agriculture background, and big corporate leadership affects the company’s transition to all-indoor growing—and how soil-based indoor farming will stack up against other methods in terms of environmental footprint and economic efficiency.

We Talked To Bowery Farming About the Community Impact of Their Indoor Farming Expansion

Back in December, The Spoon reported on Bowery Farming’s plans to build a new, indoor farm in Bethlehem, Pa. The New York-based company already runs two commercial farms in the Mid-Atlantic region, plus two R&D facilities and a plant science innovation hub in New Jersey.

Bowery plans to open the Bethlehem farm sometime this year or in 2022—and meanwhile, they’re expanding in other ways. The company has doubled its revenue this year. Its products are sold in over eight times as many stores as they were last January.

Last week, The Spoon joined Bowery’s Chief Commercial Officer, Katie Seawell, on Zoom to find out how the company is engaging local communities as it expands its operations.

The most obvious way that Bowery’s farms bring value to their communities is by producing nutritious, pesticide-free food. The company expects its new Bethlehem facility to produce about 20 million clamshells of leafy greens and other produce per year. (To grow that volume of food via conventional agriculture, you’d need to use up 5 million square feet of land.)

Seawell attributes some of Bowery’s recent growth to rising consumer interest in locally grown produce and food supply chain issues—both in turn influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end of the day, she says, the company wants to build a more sustainable, productive farming model that will weather disasters.

“If we can minimize the externalities of climate change, weather events, and other disruptions that you see in the traditional food system, and can create surety of supply in a way that is more sustainable,” says Seawell, “then we can meet the moment, meet the demands of our growing population. That’s the model we’re cracking with indoor vertical farming at Bowery.”

Last year, the USDA declared Bethlehem’s South Side a food desert. The Brown and White, a local newspaper, reported on the abundance of fast food and relative lack of healthy options in the area.

Of course, Bowery’s expansion won’t solve that problem if its products aren’t accessible to locals. Seawell says that the company is taking a multi-pronged approach to boost accessibility as it expands its commercial footprint. First, the team is taking steps to make its products available to consumers across a wide range of retailers—from Whole Foods and independent grocery stores to Walmart and Giant.

“We’re also looking at innovative models for bringing our product to communities,” says Seawell. Bowery donates produce to nonprofit hunger relief organizations, including Maryland Food Bank and Table to Table.

The company has also partnered with D.C. Central Kitchen, a nonprofit that acts as a wholesale partner, reselling Bowery products to local corner stores at reduced rates. Through its Healthy Corners food program, the organization is working on building the infrastructure for corner stores to carry more fresh foods. “It’s a really cool program because it’s not just access to fresh food that these communities need,” says Seawell, “it’s the infrastructure to support fresh food programs.”

Seawell says the company will explore further community partnerships as it expands to Bethlehem and beyond.

The team is also excited about the Bethlehem farm because of the opportunities that it represents for the former industrial powerhouse. Bowery received grant support for the project from the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development and the Governor’s Action Team. The farm will be part of an economic redevelopment project intended to boost employment and create new opportunities in the area.

The farm will be located at a site that was once home to a steel mill. The tract has been identified as a brownfield (or potentially contaminated) site. “This is land that you could not farm in a traditional sense,” says Seawell. “So what we’re doing is transitioning this non-arable land into a highly productive farm that will serve this community.”

Seawell says Bowery provides entry-level employment opportunities that require no previous agricultural experience. Bowery farms also provide year-round employment, in contrast to conventional farms, which generally have seasonal work cycles.

“We cast a very wide net in terms of who we recruit in the community,” she says. “We look more for a cultural fit than any specific, hard skill set.”

The company is also considering the energy footprint of its new facility. Its existing commercial farms are run using low-impact hydropower. Seawell says the team is currently considering renewable energy strategies for the Bethlehem farm.

Last spring, Bowery raised $300 million in Series C funding, which it will use to accelerate its farming expansion and bring new products to market. Seawell says that as the company considers new sites in the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond, the team will continue to weigh their commercial bases, the availability of untapped talent pools, and sustainability issues.

“We aspire to take this model nationally, and eventually globally,” says Seawell. “So in many ways, the new Bethlehem farm is a milestone for us as we continue to think about a national footprint for Bowery.”

Red Sea Farms Raises an Additional $6M to Grow Crops With Saltwater

Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Farms has raised an additional $6 million in pre-Series A funding, bringing the total round to $16 million (h/t Wamda). Those leading the round include Aramco’s venture arm Wa’ed, the Saudi government-owned Future Investment Initiative (FII) Institute, KAUST, Global Ventures, AppHarvest, and Bonaventure. The $6 million announced over the weekend follows an initial $10 million investment the company unveiled in June of this year.

Red Sea Farms, which is based out of King Abdullah University for Science & Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, is developing a grow system for crops that relies primarily on saltwater as the primary irrigation input. As company cofounder and CSO Prof. Mark Tester told The Spoon recently, the system works on both crops grown traditionally via land and those grown indoors using hydroponics. The idea is to provide more resource options for farmers in parts of the world where freshwater is less abundant. The company’s technology can use saltwater for evaporative cooling in greenhouses, which could potentially cut a facility’s carbon footprint.

Red Sea Farms currently has three grow sites, all in Saudi Arabia. The pre-Series A round of funding will help the company expand its operations in Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Middle East, as well as explore opportunities in the U.S. “where growing conditions are harsh.”

A number of companies have announced crop innovations for the Middle East region this year, including iFarm’s partnership with Sadarah Partners in Qatar and AeroFarms’ developing a R&D hub in the UAE. Also in 2021, Estonian automated gardening company Natufia announced its relocation to Saudi Arabia. Most of these developments are in response to a rising urgency around global food security coupled with a need to reduce the planet’s over-reliance on traditional agriculture resources (e.g., freshwater, land).

Red Sea Farms says it can cut freshwater consumption of farming operations by by 85 to 90 percent through its grow system.

AeroFarms Partners With Nokia to Build Out Drone Control and Other Indoor Ag Tech

Vertical farming company AeroFarms announced today an official partnership with Nokia Bell Labs to further develop the technology capabilities of its industrial-scale indoor ag operation. 

Currently, New Jersey-based AeroFarms uses a proprietary system that combines machine vision and machine learning technologies with the company’s agSTACK software, custom lighting, and aeroponics. The goal is to create an indoor farming environment where temperature, humidity levels, and other environmental factors are fully controlled, and where automation can take over some of the tasks around the farm.

According to today’s press release,  Nokia Bell Labs, which is the research arm of Nokia, will contribute its autonomous drone control and orchestration systems to the partnership as well as imaging and sensor tech and new AI capabilities.

These drones fly over the crops and autonomously image each plant to collect more data on overall plant health. AeroFarms CTO Roger Buelow said in a statement today that scientists and engineers have been working for two years to train these systems in plant biology.

From the press release:

“Nokia Bell Labs’ machine vision technology has enabled the most precise data capture yet, down to the level of individual plants, using leaf size segmentation, quantification, and pixel-based scanning to identify consistency and variation. Going beyond what even the human eye can perceive, this state-of-the art imaging technology enables the gathering of immense insights about a plant including its leaf size, stem length, coloration, curvature, spotting, and tearing.“

The end goal of all of this is to improve plant quality, nutritional profile, and taste, as well as crop yield.

To what extent drone imaging can help with that remains to be seen. So far, few indoor ag companies employ drones for any tasks on the farm, Finland’s iFarm being a notable exception. Earlier this year, the company announced a partnership with Sadarah Partners to build an indoor farm in Qatar that will include drone tech. 

AeroFarms and Nokia have worked together since 2020, testing the technologies with some of AeroFarms’ crops. As of today, the tech capabilities are “ready to scale” to all of AeroFarms’ crops as well as to the company’s forthcoming farms in Danville, Virginia and the Abu Dhabi in United Arab Emirates. 

 

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.

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.”

Rise Gardens Raises $9M in Series A Funding

Rise Gardens has raised $9 million in an oversubscribed Series A Round, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. The round was led by TELUS Ventures with participation from existing investors True Ventures and Amazon Alexa Fund and new investor Listen Ventures. It brings Rise’s total funding to date to $13 million. 

New funds will go towards product development and expansion, according to the company. As of right now, Rise Gardens makes an IoT-connected hydroponic grow system for the consumer home. The company provides the farming system, seed pods, nutrients for the water, and accompanying mobile app that users can rely on to monitor and manage plant growth. The garden comes in three sizes, plus a tabletop version that was released at the end of last year. 

As of right now, there are no voice control features on the gardens. But Rise CEO Hank Adams hinted last year at an eventual collaboration with Amazon that would bring Alexa functionality to the system. The Amazon Alexa Fund’s involvement in today’s funding round suggests that ambition is still very much in the plans. Rise will also in the near future sell its gardens via Amazon, marking the first time the product will be available via something other than the company’s direct-to-consumer channel.

Rise is one of a number of companies trying to bring the concept of high-tech gardening into consumers’ homes. Other notables right now include Gardyn, which makes a compact indoor-only unit, Lettuce Grow’s Farmstand, which can work both indoors and outdoors, and Hong Kong-based Aspara’s countertop unit.

All of these systems use hydroponics to grow leafy greens and herbs. They also all, at this point, come with a hefty price tag: Rise’s Single-Family Garden starts at $549 USD, for example, while a Lettuce Grow unit that holds 24 plants and includes LED lights costs $849.

Adams said today that part of its new funds will go towards reaching “an even wider audience in the U.S., Canada and around the world.”