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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Vertical Farming

Freight Farms Launches Its Greenery S Vertical Farm System

Freight Farms, best known for its controlled environment agriculture (CEA) tech made for small spaces, this week unveiled Greenery S, the latest model of the company’s vertical container farm system. This is the tenth generation of the Greenery and includes “a fresh suite of features,” according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

Said features are many, and include improvements to Freight Farm’s proprietary LED lighting system, which is meant to mimic the light spectrum of the sun. With the Greenery S, farmers can adjust that spectrum as well as light intensity and duration according to the needs of each individual crop. Other new features include greater controls for elements like humidity and cooling, as well as more cameras and expansion room for sensors. The latter two items on that list are crucial when it comes to uploading data to the Freight Farms network growers can then access to monitor their plants. 

The farm’s automation software, farmhand, includes a new feature called Recipes. With the feature, growers choose the crop within the app and the software automatically calculates light, temperature, and humidity levels for the plants, based on data collected from past harvests in the Freight Farms network. 

Typically, this type of farm gets referred to as a “container farm,” since it’s usually housed in a refurbed shipping container. Another term floating around out there is “prefabricated modular farm,” which doesn’t roll off the tongue so easily but might be a more accurate descriptor of what’s going on. The container in which the farm lives is less important than the actual system running the farm, which can be adapted to run everything from a single-unit farm behind a school or grocery store to multi-unit setups like those of Square Roots. Theoretically, you could take a Freight Farms setup and stick it inside a different type of closed-off structure and it would do the same thing. 

For now, however, Freight Farms is sticking to shipping containers, as they are easily adaptable to the vertical farming environment. The company said this week it services more than 500 trained farmers across 48 U.S. states and more than 32 countries. Those interested can reserve a Greenery S model now. 

Maine Colleges and Hospitals Will Get CEA-Grown Greens Thanks to Sodexo and Vertical Harvest

Foodservice and facilities management company Sodexo announced this week it will partner with controlled environment agriculture (CEA) grower Vertical Harvest to source greens from the latter’s forthcoming vertical farm in Maine. Sodexo said it will source about 80 percent of its lettuce products distributed in its Maine facilities from that farm, rather than importing food from other states.

Vertical Harvest is scheduled to break ground on the Westbrook, Maine farm in August 2021. When completed, the farm will be a four-story, 70,000-square-foot facility that produces about 1 million pounds of lettuce annually. The company already operates one farm, in Jackson, Wyoming, where it grows different types of leafy greens and distributes those to grocery stores and restaurants.

Because of its climate, Maine imports a good deal of its produce from other regions. Vertical Harvest says that once its Westbrook farm is operational, it will “displace” much of this out-of-state produce. Growers will also be able to produce year-round, which normally wouldn’t be possible in a state as far north as Maine.

Sodexo, meanwhile, is one of the largest employers in Maine, and says it serves about 13,000 meals per day at colleges and hospitals across the state. By partnering with Vertical Harvest, the company will be able to serve fresher, more local greens at all 14 of its partner locations in the state.

This isn’t Sodexo’s first time to partner with a CEA company, either. In 2020, the foodservice giant announced a partnership with Freight Farms to bring container grow systems to school cafeterias and university dining halls around the U.S. Elsewhere in the world of food innovation, Sodexo has also launched an Impossible Burger menu and sent Kiwi’s delivery robots across college campuses with food deliveries. 

Q1 2021: AppHarvest Bets on Robots, Strawberries and More Data in the Greenhouse

Control ag company AppHarvest is adding more of both crop types and technologies to its budding greenhouse network, according to the company’s Q1 2021 earnings call this week. That includes strawberries, leafy greens, harvesting bots, and lots of data.

The company, which went public in February, is best known at this point for the 60-acre greenhouse facility it operates in Morehead, Kentucky, where it grows beefsteak tomatoes. AppHarvest sent out its first shipment of these tomatoes to grocery stores earlier this year. Customers now include Kroger and Wendy’s.

CEO Jonathan Webb said on the company’s earnings call this week that two more Kentucky greenhouses, one in Richmond and one in Berea, will be operational next year, and that with them, AppHarvest will start growing leafy greens and strawberries. Webb pointed out that while his company may have started with tomatoes — a fairly traditional crop when it comes to greenhouse growing — the eventual aim is to “grow the company into a trusted high-tech sustainable food company.”

As far as that tech goes, AppHarvest’s CTO Josh Lessing said on the investor call that the company is investing in “robotics, artificial intelligence, teleoperation, and proprietary seed genetics.” To date, its biggest move has been the acquisition of Root AI, a startup best known for its crop-harvesting bot Virgo. (Lessing was the cofounder and CEO of Root AI before the acquisition.)

“Presently, we are training our intelligent robot Virgo to manage crops and inform growing decisions,” Lessing said on the call, adding that Virgo could eventually be configured to harvest multiple different crops, including delicate ones like strawberries — hence the company’s announcement to move into the realm of berry growing. 

As a crop, strawberries are highly suited to the controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) realm because they are extremely delicate, perishable, and normally require boatloads of pesticides when grown outside. Moving the grow process indoors, to a fully controlled environment, means better protection for crops from weather hazards, no pests and therefore no need for pesticides, and more consistent temperatures and humidity levels that can ensure better-tasting plants with a more robust nutritional profile. 

Given the amount of sunlight strawberries need for optimal growing, greenhouse settings are obvious candidates, since they rely largely on the sun with only supplemental LEDs. However, vertical farms, which use LEDs to mimic the sun’s light spectrum, are also now growing strawberries. Plenty, Oishii, and SinGrow are just a few of the names on that list. Whether one method will wind up superior to the other will (among other things) depend on what the end product tastes like as well as how much it costs to grow, sell, and buy.

For AppHarvest, though, the real win with technology will be not so much about the crops it can grow but the data Virgo and other tools can collect. That data can in turn get analyzed and turned into actions and insights applicable across the AppHarvest greenhouse network. “Granular plant level data from each fruit means we can learn exactly how to optimize quality, production, sales and logistics,” said Lessing. “This foundation will give us the opportunity to restructure the world’s food supply in order to mirror the hyper efficient e-commerce landscape.”

Along those lines, the company will expand beyond these first three facilities in the future. Two more projects will be announced this summer and are slated to be operational in late 2022. Webb said on this week’s call the company is on track to operate 12 greenhouses by 2025. By then, one imagines those facilities will grow a whole lot more than greens, strawberries, and tomatoes.

UAE: The Next Big Food Tech Hub?

Singapore may be getting all the headlines as the latest destination for food tech, but another up-and-coming place to watch is the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The country recently launched a major new food tech hub in Dubai meant to boost internal food security while also turning UAE into a global superpower for food tech. The facility includes laboratories, research centers, and prototype agricultural systems, all situated on a single campus.

Dubbed the Food Tech Valley, the project is the first phase of a wider initiative designed to assist the UAE with meeting its National Food Security Strategy 2051 targets. Among the Strategy’s goals are increasing food production and agriculture in the country, adopting more food technologies, achieving zero hunger in the UAE, and introducing legislation that improves nutrition while reducing waste.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of UAE and Ruler of Dubai, launched the Food Tech Valley at the beginning of May. 

The facility, which was designed to physically resemble a head of wheat (see image above), is divided into four main areas:

  • A dedicated area for ag tech and engineering will include a vertical farm as well as projects on bioengineering, robotics, and automation.
  • A food innovation center that will function as an incubator for promising food tech startups and businesses. 
  • R&D facilities will be dedicated to a number of different topic areas that include making crops more drought-resistant, alternative protein production, 3D printing, and crop monitoring and analysis.
  • A food-storage system aims to make food storage, distribution, and transportation more efficient through the use of more technologies. 

The UAE’s Minister of State for Food Security, Mariam Al Mheiri, said the Food Tech Valley is “critical to the goal of achieving self-sufficiency and conserving essential resources.”

The UAE currently ranks 42 among 113 countries on the Global Food Security Index, which grades countries based on the affordability, availability, quality, safety. and resilience of their food systems. The Index lists “agricultural research and development” as a major challenge for the country currently. 

UAE is a bit like Singapore in that a lack of arable land makes traditional agriculture and livestock production difficult. While UAE isn’t quite as high-profile as Singapore in terms of food innovation, its entirely feasible that will change over the next several months and years. Already, vertical farming companies such as Vertical Field and AeroFarms are working in the country alongside local players. With the launch of the Food Tech Valley, many more companies, local and global, are expected to join.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The CEA Food Safety Coalition Launches a Food-Safety Standard for Indoor Ag

The CEA Food Safety Coalition announced today what it says is the first-ever food safety certification program designed for leafy greens grown in controlled environment agriculture (CEA) settings. As of today, members of the Coalition can opt to have their crops assessed by the new Leafy Greens Module, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Upon passing inspection via the module, those growers can then include a “CEA food-safe” seal on their packaging. 

Founded in 2019, the goal of the Coalition is to provide science-based food-safety certification for those growing leafy greens indoors. The Coalition is not a government entity. Rather, it’s a group of leaders in the CEA space that pay membership dues and work together to provide guidance for the entire industry. The Leafy Green Module is meant to be an add-on to existing compliance standards from the Global Food Safety Initiative.  

Founding members include AeroFarms, Bowery Farming, BrightFarms, Little Leaf Farms, Plenty, Revol Greens, Superior Fresh and Vertical Field. The Coalition is also led by Executive Director Marni Karlin, the former head of government affairs and general counsel for the Organic Trade Association. 

“Current food safety standards were written for the field, and many do not address the unique attributes of controlled, indoor environments,” Karlin noted in today’s press release. “This new certification process and the accompanying on-pack seal helps to unify CEA growers while also differentiating them from traditional field agriculture.”

For example, controlled-environment farms that generally rely heavily on technology also favor circulating water systems via hydroponics. On the flip, there are elements CEA farms do not usually have to factor in, such as contamination from animal byproducts.

The Coalition’s entire certification process looks at four main areas:

  • Hazard analysis, which is the use of water, nutrients, growing media, seeds, inputs, site control and other relevant factors
  • Water that comes into contact with all plant and with food contact surfaces. “The use of recirculating water will require a continuing hazard analysis. Will also require zone-based environmental monitoring based on company-specific risk assessment.”
  • Site control, infrastructure, and system design, including all food contact surfaces and adjacent food contact surfaces, such as plant containers. This area also assesses potential physical hazards from lighting, robotics, sensors, equipment and utensils.
  • Pesticide Use and Testing, or the use of pesticides or herbicides during the plant life cycle. Generally speaking, though, CEA farms don’t use pesticides.

The new certification comes at time when both investment and consumer interest in CEA is on the rise. Leafy greens are still the most prominent crop to be grown in these farms, hence the Coalition’s focus on that produce type in this initial certification. However, other plants, including and especially strawberries, are becoming more popular with indoor vertical growers. No doubt indoor-specific safety certification for that crop is not far away.

Liberty Produce Gets Grant to Further Develop CEA in Singapore

A team led by UK-based vertical farming company Liberty Produce has won £420,000 (~$588,000 USD) from the Innovate UK fund to help advance controlled-environment farming in Singapore, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Liberty Produce and Singapore-based LivFresh will jointly lead the Hybrid Advanced Research Vertical Farming Environment Systems and Technology (HARVEST) consortium, which will also include research partners Republic Polytechnic Singapore and the James Hutton Institute.

Liberty Produce will install its Liberator farming system, developed in the UK, at the LivFresh hydroponic farm in Singapore, where it will be integrated with existing greenhouse technology. The HARVEST team will then run trials of this combined system, with the goal being to eventually release a turn-key product for Singapore food growers to use domestically. 

Because of limited land, Singapore currently imports about 90 percent of its food. This dependence on outside sources, however, has proven itself problematic at certain times — like during a pandemic, when the global food supply chain gets disrupted. 

The Singaporean government’s 30×30 initiative aims to get 30 percent of the city-state’s food produced domestically by 2030. Controlled-environment farming, such as greenhouses and vertical farms, is a major part of that plan.  

Liberty Produce develops vertical farms that are modular and can therefore be customized to a specific farming operation’s needs. They are also smaller than the massive “plant factories” a la Plenty or AeroFarms. For instance, the Liberator 5000 is roughly the size of a shipping container, according to the company, while two other models are even smaller. This smaller geographic footprint is well-suited to a place like Singapore, which is mostly urban and, as mentioned above, is already dealing with very limited land.

Liberty Produce systems are 100 percent controlled, from the amount of water and nutrients fed to crops to humidity levels to the “recipes” of LED lights. The system can grow standard leafy greens but has also grown more challenging crops, like blueberries.

The project with LivFresh will last two years and support Singapore’s national strategy around the 30×30 goal.

High-End Strawberry Grower Oishii to Launch ‘Everyday Berry’ via Vertical Farming

Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) company Oishii is best known at this point for its high-end, vertically grown strawberries that cost a cool $50 for an eight-pack. That makes the New Jersey-based company’s wares pretty inaccessible for many consumers — until now. Oishii explained this week that it will be launching an “everyday berry” in the future.

Strawberries are by many accounts the next “it” crop for CEA. As Oishii explained to Vertical Farm Daily, one of the issues with traditional strawberry production is that about 90 percent of all strawberries grown in the U.S. have to be shipped from California. To ensure safer transportation, the fruits are engineered to be resilient at the expense of quality and taste. 

Oishii’s Omakase Berry, which the company grows in its vertical farm facility in New Jersey, is in many ways the antithesis of the traditionally grown strawberry. Omakase Berries typically only grow for a short part of the year in a very specific region of Japan, and they are known for their sweetness and strong aromas. They are also, as noted above, a very premium produce item and, in the case of Oishii, a very expensive one.

But now, Oishii is using its recently raised $50 million funding round to expand R&D and commercialize an everyday berry, with the goal of becoming one of the largest strawberry growers in the world. Oishii will apply the learnings and proprietary technology used to grow its Omakase Berry towards other strawberries as well as other crops, such as tomatoes and peppers.

Strawberries are one of the dirtier crops when it comes to pesticides, and more than one CEA company is now attempting to grow the fruit indoors at scale. Plenty announced a partnership with berry grower Driscoll’s last year. Meanwhile, a Singapore-based company called SinGrow is growing strawberries indoors to make the fruit more widely available in the city state without relying on imports.

Oishii said this week it will focus for now on local markets in northern New Jersey and New York, but also plans to build more farms in other cities and even countries. 

Les Nouvelles Fermes Raises €2M to Expand Its Aquaponics Farms

Bordeaux, France-based indoor farming company Les Nouvelles Fermes announced today it has raised €2 million (~$2.4 million USD) to build what it’s calling the largest aquaponic farm in Europe. EU Startups was first to write about the news. The round included participation from IRDI, the Banque des Territoires, Crédit Agricole Aquitaine and the CIC. This is Les Nouvelles Fermes first round of funding.

The new farm, dubbed “Odette,” will launch at the end of 2021 in the Bordeaux Metropolitan area. Like Les Nouvelles Fermes’ current farm, also in Bordeaux, Odette will use a closed-circuit aquaponics system to grow both vegetables and fish. 

Aquaponics combines raising fish in tanks with growing produce via hydroponics. Nutrient-rich discharge from the fish is fed to the plants, which then can clean the water that goes back to the fish, creating an entirely closed-loop system. 

“Pauline,” Les Nouvelles Fermes’ current farm, grows a mixture of leafy greens, fruits, and vegetables, in addition to raising rainbow trout. The forthcoming Odette will do the same. EU Startups noted that the company’s object in opening a new farm is to “to validate an operating model and then reproduce it in the immediate vicinity of the major urban centres in France and Europe, with the possibility to restore abandoned land, while creating agricultural occupations.”

Closed-loop systems like Pauline and Odette aren’t yet widespread in the indoor farming community yet. However, given the many sustainability issues around both fishing and farming, that may change as technologies get cheaper and a little more standardized. Upward Farms, based in Brooklyn, New York, is another company producing fish and leafy greens via a closed-loop system.

Along those lines, Les Nousvelles Fermes plans to duplicate its model and technology on a much larger scale in future. The company has already signed a partnership with the company Orange to further develop its technological solution. 

Square Roots Unveils Its Third Modular Indoor Farm, Built in Just 3 Months

Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) company Square Roots today unveiled its newest indoor farm. The facility is located in Grand Rapids, Michigan and growing micro-greens to serve grocery stores, e-commerce platforms, and restaurants in the Great Lakes region. Produce will be available “in the coming weeks,” according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

Square Roots broke ground on the farm in December of 2020 and planted the first seeds just three months later, in March of this year. The company’s ability to move this quickly can be largely attributed to the types of farms it builds, which company cofounder and CEO Tobias Peggs calls “prefabricated modular farms.” For Square Roots and others, these are typically built inside of upcycled shipping containers (though Peggs suggested over a call this week that the setup could live in any properly insulated space, not just a container). As the word “modular” suggests, farming units can be added or subtracted based on the needs of the individual farm.

The aim he and company cofounder Kimball Musk share is to be able to build a farm quickly in response to demand for local produce in a given area. The new farm in Michigan, for example, is partly in response to the increase in demand for local produce across the Midwest during the Covid-19 pandemic. And it doesn’t get much more local than placing the farm in the same zip code as its customers, as Peggs said is the case here. 

The Michigan farm also shares a location with U.S. food distributor Gordon Food Service, with whom Square Roots has an ongoing partnership. The companies first joined forces in 2019 and plan to build more of these these co-located farms across the country.

One bonus of the prefabricated modular model versus something like a large plant factory (a la Plenty or AeroFarms) is that the size of the farm can be scaled up or down to meet demand relatively quickly by adding or subtracting containers. Each container is its own grow environment, with temperature and lighting adjusted to meet the needs of a specific crop.   

All containers are cloud-connected and run by a combination of human growers and Square Roots in-house software called The Square Roots Farmer Toolbelt. The latter guides farmers through day-to-day activities and collects data that can then be analyzed to improve yield, taste, and texture in addition to growing methods.

As far as competition goes, Berlin, Germany-based InFarm is probably the most similar operation to Square Roots right now. However, InFarm’s modular concept was only announced this year, and at last check is only slated for one U.S. location right now.

For now, the new farm is growing microgreens and herbs, as is the case with other Square Roots farms. Peggs said during our talk that growing other produce types, whether it be strawberries or root vegetables, is less a question of capability these days and one that’s more about economics. At the risk of oversimplifying the matter, is costs more money to grow denser vegetables, like a turnip, compared to something like basil.

That said, Square Roots mentioned in today’s press release that it has grown over 200 varieties of produce so far, including some of those denser varieties like root vegetables. 

AppHarvest Acquires Crop Harvesting Robot Startup Root AI for $60M

Controlled ag company AppHarvest announced today that it has acquired Root AI, a startup that makes AI-based robots for harvesting crops grown in indoor farms. According to the press announcement, AppHarvest is spending roughly $60 million to acquire Root AI, with $10 million in cash and the balance in AppHarvest common shares. Root AI had raised $9.5 million in funding.

Root AI makes Virgo, a universal harvester that can be configured to identify and harvest different crops such as tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and strawberries. Virgo’s cameras use computer vision along with an infrared laser to create a 3D color scan of an area to determine what work the robot needs to perform.

For a crop like tomatoes, the system figures out the orientation of the fruit and determines if they are ripe enough to pick. Once it “sees” which tomatoes need to be picked, Virgo selects the most efficient route to picking the fruit and then sends a robotic arm and gripper to pluck the fruit.

Root AI - Going Cross-Crop

The acquisition makes sense for AppHarvest, which runs a 2.76 million square foot indoor farm in Morehead, Kentucky that is expected to produce roughly 45 million pounds of tomatoes each year. That facility uses an array of sensors, LEDs and other automated systems to control the entire growing process. Adding robotics harvesters to its stack seems like a logical next step for AppHarvest — particularly as the company is in the process of building out its network of farms. AppHarvest has two more farms currently under construction in Kentucky.

The company is also flush with cash, having went public via SPAC in February, giving it $435 million in “unrestricted cash” to run and grow its operations.

After the acquisition, Root AI’s 19 employees are expected to join AppHarvest, with Co-Founder and CEO Josh Lessing taking on the role of AppHarvest CTO, and Co-Founder Ryan Knopf joining as VP of technology.

AeroFarms Partners With Hortifrut to Grow Blueberries, Caneberries Via Vertical Farming

Vertical farming company AeroFarms this week announced it a partnership with Chile-based berry producer and distributor Hortifrut. Via the multi-year partnership, the companies will research and develop blueberry and caneberry production in controlled environment agriculture (CEA) settings, including vertical farms.

Up to now, AeroFarms has been known primarily for growing leafy greens and herbs inside its commercial-scale vertical farms on the east coast. Blueberries and caneberries (blackberries, raspberries, etc.) are both a departure from the usual from AeroFarms, and somewhat unique in the vertical farming space, where strawberries are more common. 

According to a press release, the first phase of the partnership between the two companies is underway, and blueberry plants will arrive at AeroFarms’ New Jersey facility this spring. Hortifrut has bred “compact blueberry plants ideal for vertical farming,” while AeroFarms has adjusted its proprietary tech system for berry production. 

While the companies aim to commercialize the process of growing these berries indoors, there is not yet any kind of timeframe as to when we might see vertically grown blueberries or caneberries on store shelves. Rather, this first phase of the partnership appears to be more about experimenting with Hortifrut berries in an indoor setting and assessing how feasible it is to grow such foods via CEA.

Fruit on the vertical farm is still the exception rather than the rule when it comes to the crops companies grow. As noted above, strawberries are more common at this point, with companies like SinGrow and Oishii growing high-end versions of the berry and Plenty partnering with Driscoll’s on the west coast. 

AeroFarms’ news comes just days after the company announced it will go public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Spring Valley Acquisition Corp.