It says something about the popularity of at-home indoor farms when a Kickstarter campaign for one meets its funding goal in 20 minutes.
Such was the case recently with Click & Grow, an Estonian-born startup that cites NASA as the chief inspiration behind its smart garden systems. Click & Grow was one of the original wave of companies bringing the concept of at-home indoor farming to the masses. Thanks to the pandemic, food supply chain disruptions, and general concerns about health and wellness, the idea of growing produce on your own countertop has only become bigger over the last year or so.
Hence the company’s Kickstarter campaign for its Click & Grow 25 device reaching its $35,000 goal so darn quickly when it launched a few days ago.
The Click & Grow 25 is a tabletop farm that, in the company’s own words, “works like a Nespresso coffee machine, only instead of coffee pods, you use biodegradable Smart Soil plant pods to grow fresh greens all year round.” The Smart Soil is one of Click & Grow’s claims to fame. It’s a plant-based growth substrate that was developed in-house. When placed in pods that are then inserted into the garden, the Smart Soil releases a mixture of nutrients, oxygen, and water, with levels of each calculated for the specific seed type in each pod.
An accompanying mobile app provides timelines and grow tips for each plant, along with reminders and the ability to control the lighting settings on the actual device. It also offers recipe suggestions.
The device also features removable trays, so that one can be removed at harvest time and replaced with another full of fresh seeds, keeping the grow cycle constant. As of now, it can grow 25 plants simultaneously per module. Since the device is modular, grow units can be added based on the number of people in a household. Click & Grow recommends one unit for a single-person household, one to two for a couple, and two to three and above for families.
The campaign has already nabbed over $360,000 and has 22 days left. Those that pledge $499 or more get one Click & Grow 25 device that includes a three-month supply of grow pods. That’s a substantially lower price point than the $799 estimated retail price the device will carry when it is officially launched.
Click & Grow says devices will ship in February of 2022.
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