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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Fifth Season

Fifth Season Expands the Grocery Footprint for Its Vertically Grown Greens

Fifth Season, a company using vertical farming and robotics to grow greens indoors, just announced a sizable expansion for its leafy green products in Giant Eagle Retail stores. As of today, Fifth Season greens will be available in over 75 Giant Eagle and Market District stores across Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio metro areas. 

The expansion is a significant jump from the company’s previous distribution reach, which was just 10 stores in the Pittsburgh area. The company also launched a direct-to-consumer service for Pittsburgh-area residents in 2020.

Like other controlled ag companies, Fifth Season grows greens vertically indoors, aiding the process with hydroponics and technology (sensors, AI, etc.). Its main differentiator at the moment is the robotics element of its grow process. A proprietary robotics system handles tasks on the farm such as stacking and moving trays of plants, harvesting, and packaging. While the system is overseen by a human, actual bodies are less needed in the grow room of Fifth Season’s farm, which cuts down on labor costs and can execute tasks faster. Human-free grow rooms also mean there is less chance of pathogens getting into the growing space and impacting plants’ health.

The use of robotics isn’t yet widespread in vertical farming, although that is changing quickly, with companies like Nordic Harvest and iFarm introducing a range of robotics and automation technologies to their operations. Kalera, which is expanding rapidly across the U.S., is another notable example.

For Fifth Season, today’s news marks the company’s first expansion outside of its hometown of Pittsburgh. The company will sell four different varieties of its greens as well as ready-to-eat salads at the new retail locations.

The company said in today’s press release that it is the first of many expansions Fifth Season will announce in 2021. 

Fifth Season Launches a Direct-to-Consumer Program for Vertically Grown Greens

Vertical farming company Fifth Season, which just opened its first commercial-scale farm outside Pittsburgh, PA, announced today the launch of its direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform and a new partnership to assist the company with expansion.

Fifth Season’s farm uses hydroponics, AI, and robotics to grow what the company hopes will be 500,000 pounds of leafy greens and herbs annually. The robotics element is especially interesting because it allows the company to automate tasks on the farm that would otherwise be difficult for humans to perform — climbing multiple stories to retrieve grow trays, for example. Human still work on the farm, but the addition of robotics brings down some of the labor costs.

The new direct-to-consumer program sells the greens grown on this farm to customers via the company’s new e-commerce site. Products include packs of leafy greens as well as BYO salad kits. And as far as pricing goes, the goods are on par with what you would find in the grocery store: $7.99 for two 5 oz. packs of greens and $17.50 for two salad kits.

Since one of the key points of large-scale vertical farming is to connect consumers with more local produce, right now the e-commerce site only ships to the Pittsburg area. They are also available at a number of Whole Foods and Giant Eagle stores.

The company plans to expand its farming locations into additional parts of the U.S. at some point in the future, although there’s no official timeline for that yet. One thing that may help is a new partnership the company just struck with NHL Hall of Famer and co-owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins, Mario Lemieux. According to today’s press release, the partnership will “accelerate Fifth Season’s expansion plans.”

Large-scale vertical farming continues to attract investment dollars. Earlier this year, Boston, MA-based Freight Farms raised $15 million and also partnered with Sodexo to bring its container farms to U.S. schools. North of the border, Elevate Farms just netted a $10 million investment to bring vertical farming to remote, food-insecure areas of Canada. And Singapore startup SinGrow, which just joined AgFunder’s investment portfolio, aims to grow more than leafy greens, starting with its own proprietary strawberries.

Fifth Season itself has attracted its fair share of investments. It raised a $35 million round in October 2019 led by Drive Capital and including additional investors with ties to Carnegie Mellon University, where the idea for the company was originally born. 

Fifth Season Announces Robot-Powered Vertical Farm Near Pittsburgh

Indoor farming company Fifth Season today announced plans for its first commercial-scale vertical farm, which will open in early 2020 in Braddock, PA, an historic steel town near Pittsburgh.

To date, the company — originally founded as RoBotany Ltd. — has raised over $35 million. It incubated at Carnegie Mellon University’s Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship and currently has two test farms in Pittsburgh that supply greens to Giant Eagle and Whole Foods stores in the area, as well as to local restaurants. Fifth Season’s forthcoming new farm will grow over 500,000 pounds of lettuce in the first year of operation. The company plans to expand to additional locations throughout the U.S. in the future.

More importantly, the company, along with its cofounder and CEO Austin Webb, see robotics as a key element to vertical farming. Fifth Season uses a proprietary robotics and AI solution to assist in multiple areas of the vertical farm, from seeding to harvesting to packaging. While humans still work onsite at the farms, the bots take care of much of the heavy lifting — literally, in some cases. As AgFunder pointed out, with robots around, humans don’t have to climb multiple stories to get heavy grow trays with greens needing to be harvested.

Cutting down on this expensive labor could allow Fifth Season to offer its greens at more competitive prices in the future. “We have developed fully integrated, proprietary technology to completely control the hydroponic growing process and optimize key factors such as energy, labor usage and crop output,” Webb said in a statement, adding that the company’s “unprecedented low costs set a new standard for the future of the industry.”

We’re seeing more and more of these large-scale vertical farms that utilize automation to speed up tasks around the farm and also reduce labor costs. That includes fully autonomous systems, like Australia’s Vertical Farm Systems, or farms like Intelligent Growth Systems that use software to make vertical farming easier for those who don’t have an agricultural or engineering background. Kalera, who just broke ground on the Southeast’s largest vertical farm, is looking at fully automated solutions for future locations.

It’s far too soon to tell if any of these solutions will actually deliver the kinds of financial returns to help make vertical farming a more widespread reality, not to mention make it possible to price greens affordably in mainstream grocery retailers. Robots are one answer, and a promising one that that. We’ll need more data on what is and isn’t working, though, to better understand if they’re the entire future of vertical farming or one small piece of a much larger picture.