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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Freight Farms

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. 

Freight Farms Partners With Arcadia to Provide Growers With Clean Energy Options

Freight Farms announced today it has partnered with clean energy service Arcadia to offer growers a way to connect their farms to cleaner sources of energy. The new program, available to all Freight Farms customers in the U.S., will let growers synch their utility to one of Arcadia’s wind or solar farms, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Arcadia will then match 100 percent of the farm’s electrical consumption with solar and wind energy.

Freight Farms helped to popularize the concept of turning old shipping containers into vertical farms that grow produce like leafy greens, herbs, and tomatoes. The farms, of course, require electricity to function, since most controlled-environment farms rely on LEDs as their plants’ light source and need additional energy for temperature control and dehumidifying. There isn’t a lot of public data yet on how much power these farms use, which in turn has led to a lot of questions in the last couple years around how energy efficient they actually are. 

While they’re not giving away any hard numbers on energy consumption, Freight Farms and Arcadia claim their new partnership can connect growers to cleaner forms of energy, including wind and solar, and potentially reduce their energy costs. The program builds on Arcadia’s existing subscription model, where users pay a flat monthly fee to connect their utility to Arcadia’s clean energy sources.  

Once a Freight Farm is connected, Arcadia will match 100 percent of its electricity generated by purchasing the equivalent amount of wind and solar energy in the form of Renewable Energy Certificates. Growers may, based on their location in the U.S., also be able to cut down on energy costs.

There are two options for membership, based on a farm’s location. Growers located in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Illinois, Colorado, Maryland, and Maine can sign up and access the community solar power market. Those in other states sign up for $5/month to access cleaner energy, according to today’s press release. 

Arcadia’s systems automate everything, so signing up for the program doesn’t require any extra steps on the part of the grower. 

Since the program is brand new, it’s difficult to say exactly how much energy is saved through it or what the actual cost savings for individual farmers are. Freight Farms said today only that the program “reduces Freight Farmers’ carbon footprint to one-quarter of industrial farming operations.”

   

Thrive Containers Officially Launches Its Controlled Environment Farming System

St. Petersburg, Florida-based Thrive Containers officially launched operations this week for its controlled-environment farming technology, a hardware-software system for growing produce out of shipping containers. The company’s first model, dubbed the Ohio Farm Container Model, is built for growing leafy greens, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

Like other companies in the indoor ag space, Thrive builds its farms inside 40-foot-long shipping containers and grows plants vertically. Thrive uses the Flood and Drain hydroponic growing method for plants, which is exactly as it sounds. Plant roots are periodically “flooded” with nutrient-enriched water, which saturates the growth medium in which the plants sit. The nutrient solution is then drained, and the process is repeated, usually multiple times a day. 

Artemis’ (née Agrylist) provides the software to control those water cycles as well as the light “recipes” for the plants. Via a smartphone interface, growers can create planting schedules, control the climate inside the containers, track crop health, and detect food-safety issues.

Thrive is owned by Brick Street Farms, a company that recently partnered with Publix brand Greenwise to bring its container farms to grocery stores in Florida. Thrive hasn’t yet said if it plans to follow in its parent company’s steps and focus on grocery. Other potential use cases include bringing farms to schools, as Freight Farms has done, and locating them at food distribution centers, as Square Roots and Gordon Food Service have.

Thrive’s farms can currently grow a variety of lettuces and yield between about 5,000 and 12,000 pounds of greens annually, depending on the crop. Pricing for the Ohio starts at $127,500. For an additional cost, growers can add extra equipment like containers for cold storage and packing. Future models, including those designed to grow micro greens and cannabis, are listed on the company’s website, though specific release dates are yet to be revealed.

Vertical Farming Could Help Us Build a More Equitable Food System

One of the recurring questions vertical farming companies face is how they are going to get their locally grown, supposedly healthier wares to more than just those with disposable income. So far, the answers have been few and far between, but that could be changing. Towards the end of last week, ABC7 reported that New Jersey-based AeroFarms and World Economic Forum have partnered with the City of Jersey City to distribute greens free of charge to communities in need.

While AeroFarms actually hinted at the news back in June, it’s worth reiterating here because it underscores the point that vertical farming can — and should — play a much bigger role than simply providing greens to high-end groceries and restaurants. 

This is the first partnership between a city municipality and a vertical farming company in the U.S. Through it, AeroFarms will build 10 vertical farms in senior centers, schools, public housing, and municipal buildings around Jersey City. Collectively, the farms are expected to produce 19,000 pounds of vegetables annually, according to AeroFarms. Greens will be free of charge to residents, and the initiative also includes healthy eating workshops and quarterly health screenings.

The idea, of course, is to get healthier foods and food habits to those in food-insecure communities.

Speaking to ABC7, Jersey City Director of Health and Human Service Stacey Flanagan said that while food security has always been an issue, “with COVID it’s just exacerbated that.”

Her point is an important one. We talk about the ways in which the pandemic has forced us to rethink our eating choices and habits. Thanks in no small part to the pandemic, plant-based foods are on the rise, consumers are vying for space on CSA waitlists, and vertical farming companies are now releasing models of their high-tech systems for individual homes. But it’s a small number of consumers that have the time or money to explore those options.

For many, a $10 pack of alt-meat or a $500 at-home farm remain out of reach in terms of accessibility and affordability. As JourneyFoods’ CEO Riana Lynn reminded us recently, our eating is not equal, and lack of access to food is less the issue as lack of access to nutritious food: “Even when we are braced with an overwhelming lot of food options, they almost always lack the nutrient-density need to curb away from negative outcomes.” 

As it is right now, vertical farming, because of its focus on leafy greens, can’t adequately feed a community in the sense of it providing a healthy balance of proteins, vitamins, and calories. But it can play a role in bringing more nutritious elements to that community, which is what AeroFarms’ new partnership seems to be about. And we’ve seen promising news in the recent past that shows these farms will grow more than arugula one day: strawberries and even wheat, for example. 

AeroFarms isn’t alone in trying to bring more food equity to the vertical farming sector. Boston-based Freight Farms works with Miami’s Lotus House, a facility and resource center for women and children experiencing homelessness. The farm works in tandem with Lotus House’s Culinary Center, supplying both food and education to residents.

Over in Chicago, Wilder Fields has taken an abandoned Target store located in a food desert and turned it into a massive vertical farming facility to supply 25 million heads of lettuce to local grocery stores. The facility will also house an educational and retail component, and sell greens for cheaper than you would find at, say Whole Foods.

North of the border, Elevate Farms and North Star Agriculture Corp. are building out farms in isolated parts of Northern Canada, where food insecurity is rampant. 

All of these efforts (and quite a few more) suggests vertical farming has a dual role to play in future. If it can prove itself scalable, which it seems to be doing so far, it can provide a healthier alternative to traditional farming. And it can help lead the charge for food and food tech companies when it comes to creating more equality in our food system.

PlantLab Nabs €20M to Open New Vertical Farming Locations

PlantLab, a vertical farming company based in The Netherlands, has raised €20 million (~$23,171 USD) in growth capital to  scale up its high-tech indoor farming operations and expand to new locations, including the U.S. (h/t Horti Daily) The round was led by De Hoge Dennen Capital. 

PlantLab said it would use the investment funds to open more locations and improve its technology. As with other vertical farming facilities, the tech controls the grow environment — everything from the light mixture to the temperature at the root zone of the plants to the level of humidity in the air. 

The company calls these grow environments “Plant Production Units,” and it has been perfecting the model since 2005. Right now, the company operates a facility in Amsterdam. It also struck a partnership with foodservice provider Van Gelder in 2019 to supply chefs working with the Van Gelder.

Since the start of the year, the vertical farming sector has seen a steady supply of investment dollars. Boston-based Freight Farms raised a $15 million Series B round, Elevate Farms nabbed $10 million, and Upward Farms, a combination vertical farm and aquaponics facility, grabbed $15 million. 

On top of all that investment has been a number of announcements for new commercial-scale facilities and a push to bring the vertical farming concept into new markets like grocery stores and the consumer kitchen.

All this activity isn’t surprising, given the times. Demand for vertically grown greens was already up before the pandemic. A couple panic-shopping sprees and a broken food supply chain later, and more consumers are prioritizing things like food traceability, buying locally, and having more control over where their food comes from. How high this demand reaches will depend on the variety of crops these farms can eventually grow (aka, more than leafy greens) and how well they can scale economically.

For its part, PlantLab has new facilities planned for the Netherlands, the U.S., and the Bahamas, among other locations. 

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. 

InFarm’s High-Tech Vertical Farms Head to Canadian Grocery Stores

InFarm is bringing its in-store vertical farming systems to Empire supermarkets across Canada, according to a press release from Empire. The partnership will launch this coming spring and put InFarms’s high-tech farm pods in stores across that country, including at Empire subsidiaries Sobeys, Thrifty Foods, and Safeway Canada. 

Berlin-based InFarm, which raised $100 million in June of 2019, has struck multiple deals with grocery store chains around the world over the last several months, including Irma in Denmark, M&S in the UK, and Kroger stores in the U.S. The company is one of many startups developing vertical and/or indoor farming solutions meant to shorten the food supply chain by growing greens closer to food stores.

With InFarm, that means growing those leafy greens and herbs inside the produce section of stores. The company’s indoor farms come in the form of enclosed pods that use the hydroponic grow method, meaning plant roots are submerged in a nutrient-enriched water supply and no soil is involved. Cloud-based software controls the temperature, watering schedule, and light and humidity levels of the farms, adjusting those elements based on plant type. 

There are two major benefits to this in-store approach to vertical farming. Zero pesticides are used in the grow process, and greens can be harvested onsite, reducing carbon emissions since food doesn’t have to be transported to the store from a distribution center. 

Better-tasting greens is another one of InFarm’s claims. By precisely adjusting light, temperature, water levels, and other elements, vertical farmers can create ideal growing “recipes” for each plant type meant to bring out the optimal amount of flavor.

Many vertical farming companies make this claim, along with those about reduced water usage and carbon footprint. What the indoor ag industry needs next is more public data backing these claims up. With other companies — notably Square Roots and Freight Farms — striking deals of their own to get vertical farms closer to food stores, more hard numbers will be needed to show us when, where, and how these high-tech farms can be most useful in the overall food system.

InFarm will launch a range of herbs at two Safeway stores in Vancouver this spring, according to the press release, and Empire will also put farms in stores across seven Canadian cities.

Freight Farms Raises a $15M Series B Round for Its Vertical Farming Platform

Freight Farms announced today it has raised a $15 million series B round led by Ospraie Ag Science, according to a press release emailed to The Spoon. The round also saw participation from existing investor Spark Capital and brings Boston-based Freight Farms’ total funding thus far to $28 million.

When we checked in with Freight Farms last year, cofounder Brad McNamara said the company was “rearchitecting the whole concept of vertical farming.” Freight Farms was at the time making its farms, which are housed in shipping containers, more modular to accommodate a variety of crops as well as more efficient when it came to how much energy the LEDs on the farm use. Freight Farms launched its 320-sq-foot Greenery farm in 2019 that included these improvements as well as farmhand, the company’s IoT platform built in-house and used to monitor and manage the lifecycle of crops.

Since then, Freight Farms has expanded its reach to 44 U.S. states and 25 countries, and now serves a range of businesses and institutions, from small-business farmers to grocery retailers like Meijer and QSRs like Wendy’s.

Earlier this year, the company announced a partnership with foodservice and facilities management company Sodexo to bring vertical farms to K-12 schools and college campuses around the U.S. 

Freight Farms will use the new funds to further develop and advance the technology behind its farms. As mentioned above, this technology is built in-house and meant to be interoperable, which is a departure from a lot of other vertical farms, which often gather off-the-shelf components from various third-party manufacturers and string them together to create a system. While that method works, McNamara told me last year that it also comes with the risk of interoperability issues (the various pieces can’t “talk” to one another as easily) and can sometimes cost more to run. He also noted it’s easier to automate the entire farm when all tech is in house.

And since vertical farming as a whole has yet to prove itself as economically scalable on a large scale, we’re going to hear a lot more about automation in the coming months as Freight Farms and others develop new tools to try and bring the cost of farming down.    


Freight Farms and Sodexo Are Bringing Vertical Farming to U.S. Schools

Freight Farms, a major player in the world of containerized vertical farms, announced today a partnership with foodservice and facilities management company Sodexo. Together, the two aim to bring Freight Farms’ hydroponic vertical farms into school campuses across the U.S., according to a press release sent by Freight Farms.

In North America alone, Sodexo serves over 13,000 client sites, many of them school cafeterias and university dining halls. The new partnership means Boston-based Freight Farms will be able to implement its Greenery container farms in more locations. At the moment, the company has 35 of these farms set up at educational and corporate campuses. The Sodexo partnership will expand that number “rapidly,” according to the press release, as the two companies implement more farms at both K-12 schools and university campuses that are Sodexo customers. 

The 320-sq-foot Greenery farm uses hydroponics to grow leafy greens and herbs inside climate-controlled shipping containers. Users control watering and nutrient schedules and access data on their plants via the company’s proprietary Farmhand software, which can be accessed via the user’s smartphone. The idea is to equip growers with a turnkey offering they can flip on from anywhere in the world and use to grow food with relatively little hassle.

For schools in particular, that means outfitting students and teachers with not just freshly harvested food for the cafeteria but also potential new curriculum around technology, agriculture, and business, if students are allowed to work directly with the farms. Co-founder and CEO of Freight Farms Brad McNamara told me last year that the Greenery “allows us the opportunity to not only feed a demographic and teach them how to farm.”

Still, vertical farming has yet to prove itself in terms of scale and economics. Part of determining the success of the Freight Farms-Sodexo partnership will lie in getting more data on how well the vertical farms function in an institutional environment. Many vertical farms geared towards institutional levels of food production promise simple “plug in and grow” solutions. Not all of them deliver as promised.

And beyond basic functionality of the farms, we also need more information about whether or not its truly cost-effective to bring these farms into schools and cafeterias in place of greens transported across the country. Will the reduction in water usage and food waste translate into money saved for these institutions? Freight Farms noted in the press release that in some parts of the country, those using the Greenery can actually make their operations water positive. We don’t, however, have any numbers on how beneficial being water positive is to these organizations’ overall margins, and if it offsets, say, the electricity required to run the farms.  

This isn’t the first food-tech-focused initiative Sodexo has embarked on in the recent past. In 2019, the company partnered with Starship to bring wheeled food delivery robots to college campuses in the U.S. The company also launched an Impossible Burger menu at 1,500 of its U.S. locations.

Sodexo’s sheer reach (it’s a multi-national corporation with services all over the world) gives it a certain amount of influence over the educational sector’s meals many others wouldn’t have. If the partnership with Freight Farms can showcase both the health and economical benefits from hyper-local, hyper-traceable, longer-lasting greens onsite, it could open the door to more schools and institutions considering some form of indoor farming onsite.


Agrylist Raises $8M Series A for Data-Driven Indoor Farming, Rebrands as Artemis

Artemis, formerly known as the indoor-farming company Agrylist, announced today an $8 million Series A round. According to a press release via email, the round was co-led by Astanor Ventures and Talis Capital, with participation from New York State’s Empire State Development Fund and iSelect Fund. The latter two companies are existing investors. The new funding round brings Artemis’ total funding to $11.75 million.

As well as raising new funds, the company has retired the Agrylist moniker and rebranded as Artemis. A new website and new corporate branding are slated for June 2019, according to the press announcement.

Artemis, which was founded in 2015 and is based in Brooklyn, NY, helps indoor farmers better manage the lifecycle of their crops through a proprietary system it refers to as an “enterprise cultivation management platform.” In one interface, which can integrate with existing software tools, the system will help farmers create planting schedules, control the indoor climate, track crop health, detect food-safety issues, and manage labor costs. The system also comes packaged with basic project-management capabilities like to-do lists and daily reminder features.

Increasingly, indoor farmers are turning to these kinds of “one-stop-shop” products to help them make large-scale indoor farming economically feasible and in doing so ensure more consistent production and higher crop yields. Some systems, like those from Liberty Produce and Freight Farms, also bundle hardware like LEDs and the actual grow panels into their end-to-end systems.

Artemis, for now at least, seems more focused on the data aspect of large-scale indoor farming. Gathering useful data on crops and farming operations can help companies not only better monitor crop health, but also help them measure productivity and labor costs, and ensure they’re in line with certain compliance standards.

Even more important, more data could tell us where indoor farming could stand to be more efficient, if indeed it’s efficient at all right now. As Paul P.G. Gauthier explained to me last year, the indoor farming industry tends to claim things that aren’t necessarily backed up by data at the moment. We need more information that can tell us, for example, how much water something like hydroponics actually uses, and where the waste water from those types of operations go.

These are no doubt questions Artemis is tackling, too, as it continues to build out its product. According to the company, the new funding will go towards expanding the Artemis team in product, marketing, engineering, and sales areas, as well as towards scaling sales.

Freight Farms Is Rearchitecting the Concept of Vertical Farming

Freight Farms helped invent the now-thriving farm-in-a-container market, where companies build vertical farms inside old shipping containers to grow pesticide-free produce throughout the year. But now that vertical farming companies are sprouting up almost as fast as the leafy greens they grow, the Boston, MA-based startup wants to completely rebuild the shipping container concept.

Its new product, The Greenery, which the company just announced today, isn’t a reiteration of its existing Leafy Green Machine (LGM). Instead, it’s a complete re-imagining of the shipping container concept that enables just about anyone to farm a large variety of crops. Or in the words of Freight Farms cofounder Brad McNamara, they’re “rearchitecting the whole vertical farm concept.”

To do that, McNamara and fellow cofounder Jon Friedman kept the foundational basics in play: farming still takes place inside a 40-foot shipping container and still involves the usual mix of hydroponics, LEDs, and software to control things like plant nutrients, temperature, and light levels. But inside the walls of that 40-foot container, Freight Farms has introduced some major changes.

One of the biggest tweaks is also one of the simplest: the inclusion of a racking system that’s actually movable. Since its founding in 2010, Freight Farms has used stainless steel vertical towers arranged in rows inside the shipping containers for growing. (SF-based Plenty employs a similar structure to its farms.) While this allows for much more growing space than in most vertical farms — which actually use horizontal rows of shelves — McNamara and Friedman saw a way to make the space inside the container even more productive by enabling customization.

With The Greenery, both the grow racks and the panels that hold the LEDs are now movable, so farmers can customize the layout inside the container based on the type and number of plants they grow. “In order to accommodate a larger variety of crops, rows can expand and contract,” Friedman explains of these mobile racks. For example, some plants are rooted, some grow on vines, and some simply need more space (e.g., tomatoes). Rather than having to grow plants according to what the space inside a container dictates, Greenery allows farmers to change the space based on what they need to grow.

A big impact on growth and yield is lights — that is, LEDs. But more LED power equals more electricity, which is financially constraining on companies and just all-around bad for sustainability. “Indoor agriculture has always struggled because you’re replacing the free resource of sun with lighting,” McNamara explains.

With The Greenery, Freight Farms addressed the lighting issue by redesigning the ropes of LEDs into panels that, according to the company, triples access to light and keep light energy from being wasted. McNamara and Friedman explained to me that the new lighting design produces a light intensity that’s 3x more powerful than its predecessor (the LGM) but doesn’t incur a 3x energy increase.

Arguably, though, the biggest improvement Freight Farms has made with The Greenery isn’t any one piece of technology, but the decision to bring all the tech in-house and build it themselves.

The typical vertical farm takes various off-the-shelf technologies, such as sensors, lighting, and hydroponics, and strings them together. The result is a farm that runs off fairly siloed elements that weren’t necessarily built to “talk” to one another, which can lead to interoperability issues, higher costs, and more time spent making sure these various systems work together. By contrast, the pieces at work in The Greenery were built with interoperability in mind, which in theory at least means a more reliable system and better control over the whole operation. Freight Farms also says it’s easier to automate the farming process with all the tech in-house, thereby making it simpler for anyone to use.

“It’s a turnkey offering in that no matter where you are in the world you can just pick up the instructions and go,” says Friedman. And because of that ease and lower costs, more populations can reap the benefits of vertical farming, including underserved ones most in need of easier access to fresh food. “This platform allows us the opportunity to not only feed a demographic and teach them how to farm,” says McNamara.

And while this vertically integrated vertical farm is a fairly new concept, Freight Farms isn’t the only one trying its hand at the idea. Over in the UK, the Future Farming Hub is attempting a similar one-stop-shop indoor farm, though their project doesn’t officially kick off until April of 2019. Even so, I expect we’ll see more companies in future exploring and offering vertically integrated systems.

Freight Farms currently operates in over 15 countries, including the Everlane factory in Vietnam and a Wendy’s location in Guam. According to Friedman, The Greenery will sell initially for $104,000. The company, meanwhile, plans to expand into new markets, particularly around the non-profit sector in order to help individuals and companies give back to their communities by making it easier and faster to get healthy, locally grown food.

The Spoon Newsletter: Cinder Gets Sued; Food Blockchain Ripens; PicoBrew Ships

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Happy Friday, all! Catherine here. Our team’s hard at work putting the finishing touches on the Smart Kitchen Summit (you have your tickets, right?), but it’s been a busy couple of days for news as well.

First and foremost, a few days ago Chris Albrecht uncovered the story that Palate Home, the company behind the Cinder grill, was ordered by a court to pay $294,736 to Tony Fadell’s investment firm, Future Shape LLC. We’ve been following this smart grill, which delivers sous-vide-like precision cooking via a unique two-sided precision heating surface, for the last couple years. But like so many crowdfunded hardware companies before it, Cinder was hitting manufacturing roadblocks and delaying shipping dates to its backers. Which is why Chris looked into it in the first place — and found much more than he bargained for.

We’re not sure if this is a death knell for Cinder, though it certainly seems that way. Stay tuned for updates.

In positive news, Ripe.io, a company which is working to create the “blockchain for food,” just raised a $2.4 million seed round. Mike Wolf spoke with Raja Ramachandran, the company’s CEO and co-founder on his podcast last year. Here’s how he explained the concept behind his startup:

If a farmer wants to say I harvest strawberries these two days, well, they can say that, but do they say that to everyone? … That’s the beauty of blockchain. It manages the decentralized nature of the food business, so people can post data, they can protect it, they can share it, they can create records with it… In the end for the consumer, they basically get a longer record.

Ripe.io is capitalizing off of two trends: blockchain madness, and people’s desire for increased food transparency. If the company can successfully create the blockchain for food — something that others like Goodr and FoodLogiQ are already playing around with — then consumers can instantly know a plethora of details about their food: where it was produced, when it was harvested, whether it’s organic/GMO, etc. Ramachandran will be at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) discussing blockchain’s potential within the food system, so join us there to hear more.

The ability to trace the origin of your food with 100% accuracy is a good thing, but what if you could bring the farm to you? That’s exactly what Freight Farms, a company which creates “Leafy Green Machines” — that is, climate-controlled vertical farms in shipping containers — is trying to do.

Excited to see new ideas for recreating the future of food and cooking? We announced our Startup Showcase winners this week, so you’ll want to check them out!

Jenn Marston wrote about their new Grown service this week, which helps Freight Farms customers manage temperature, water usage, and other aspects of the indoor farm units so that they can grow produce with super-limited space. Jenn’s optimistic that this tech could allow institutions — like public schools and hospitals — to have access to super-fresh, healthy greens (and more). While smaller scale than Freight Farms, Estonian smart indoor grow system Natufia raised $1.2 million this week.

The PicoBrew Z brewing system

In other news, Mike Wolf covered PicoBrew’s initial shipment of their Z Series, a modular brewing system that lets home beer creators scale up to make 10 gallons per brew. They may have delayed the Kickstarter for their Pico U, but this shipment shows that PicoBrew is still kicking — er, brewing.

Chris also covered NEXT Future Transportation’s new mobile lockers, which are yet another step towards a future in which autonomous vehicles deliver us our groceries and pizza along with our packages. For those who still want a retail experience in the future, however, the convenience store will probably still be there — it just might look different. Read Chris’ piece on Dirty Lemon’s new cashierless, honor system-run pop-up store to see how.

Finally, this week I wrote about all the food I tasted at last week’s inaugural Good Food Conference. It’s a smorgasbord of plant-based products, from vegan sausages to eggs made of mung beans. Check it out.

Smart Kitchen Summit is a mere three and a half weeks away, and it’s shaping up to be our best one yet. Just check out our program and speakers if you don’t believe me. Don’t get left behind — use the discount code NEWSLETTER to get 25% off of tickets (just click here to have the discount applied automatically via Eventbrite).

Have a great weekend!
Catherine

In the 09/14/2018 edition:

John Pleasants Thinks the Oven of the Future is Powered by Light

By Catherine Lamb on Sep 14, 2018 10:02 am
We at the Spoon have long been curious about Brava, the stealthy smart kitchen startup which recently debuted its first product: an oven which uses the power of light to cook food quickly and precisely, with low energy usage. See him at the Smart Kitchen Summit in October.

Walmart Acquires Cornershop, While Jet.com Gets in a New York State of Mind

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 14, 2018 08:50 am
Walmart announced yesterday that it is expanding its digital presence in Latin America with the $225 million acquisition of Cornershop, an online marketplace for on-demand delivery from supermarkets in Mexico and Chile. While that move continued the retail giant’s global spending spree, domestically, the company’s subsidiary Jet.com unveiled a revamped website featuring enhanced grocery delivery options.

Dirty Lemon’s New Pop Up is Part of a Convenience Store Revolution

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 13, 2018 03:48 pm
Dirty Lemon, a startup that sells fancy water infused with ingredients like charcoal, CBD and collagen for more than $10 a pop, made The New York Times today with its new pop-up store in New York that puts you on the honor system when you pay.

Mod Pods! NEXT Future Transportation Announces Mobile Lockers

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 13, 2018 12:19 pm
A lot of transportation in old sci-fi movies was pod-based. People would travel through futuristic cities in quiet, autonomous, sleek pods that picked them up and dropped them off. What those movies missed, and is now becoming a reality, are fleets of pods running around to bring us our packages, restaurant food and groceries.

A Plant-Based Tour of What I Ate at the Good Food Conference

By Catherine Lamb on Sep 13, 2018 09:00 am
From vegan sausages by Beyond Meat to mung bean scrambled eggs from JUST, here’s a culinary tour through all the plant-based foods I tried at the Good Food Conference last week.

FoodShot Global Launches Fund to Land Food Moonshots

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 13, 2018 06:30 am
We know that there is no shortage of food-related accelerators helping get the next generation of startups off the ground. But FoodShot Global, a new investment platform that launched today, doesn’t just want to get startups off the ground: it wants them to aim for the moon.

Court Ordered Cinder Grill Maker to Repay Tony Fadell’s Investment Firm $294,736

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 12, 2018 11:00 am
Palate Home, the company behind the Cinder grill, was ordered by a San Mateo court in August to pay $294,736 to Tony Fadell’s investment firm, Future Shape LLC. The default judgment compels Palate Home to repay a $250,000 loan to Future Shape plus $43,737 in interest as well as $999 in costs.

Impossible Sliders Roll Out at all White Castles Nationwide

By Catherine Lamb on Sep 12, 2018 10:18 am
Today Impossible Foods, the company famous for their plant-based “bleeding” burgers, announced today that it’s expanding its partnership with fast food chain White Castle. The Impossible slider is now available in all of White Castle’s 377 locations, from New York to St. Louis.

PicoBrew Ships Z Series, A Modular Brewing System for Aspiring Craft Brewing Pros

By Michael Wolf on Sep 12, 2018 09:00 am
PicoBrew announced this week that the first Picobrew Z1 has rolled off the production line and made its way to the customer, local food pioneer Ron Zimmerman of the Herbfarm. As you might recall, the Picobrew Z series is PicoBrew’s attempt to fill the gap between the home and pro markets with a modular brewing system.

Freight Farms Unveils Onsite Vertical Farming Service

By Jennifer Marston on Sep 12, 2018 06:00 am
Your average institution, be it schools, company, hospital, or university, typically doesn’t have the space or cash to consider an indoor farming initiative, even if it would mean putting fresher, more local greens into cafeterias and dining halls. That’s an issue Freight Farms looks to solve with the release of its new service Grown.