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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Gardyn

Gardyn Hopes to Grow Even Greener with New Investment

This week, JAB Ventures, an investment firm with stakes in consumers brands such as Keurig Dr. Pepper, Peet’s coffee, Pret A Manger, and others in the food and beverage space, announced a $5 million investment in Gardyn, bringing the company’s capital raise this year to $15 million.

With the expanding global focus on healthy eating, climate change, and sustainable resources, companies such as Gardyn, which entered the market in 2020, are hoping to level the playing field in the home gardening space. The goal for players looking to make successful inroads into this consumer space is by offering scalable products with appeal to black and green thumbs alike. Those ahead of the pack have harnessed and simplified technologies, such as AI, to provide choice and convenience, resulting in ongoing yields of chemical-free fruits and vegetables.

“Gardyn, built on remarkable technology and a radically novel customer experience, is shaping the future of food at home,” said Joachim Creus, Senior Partner at JAB, in a company press release. “Gardyn is the clear leader in the fast-growing segment of homegrown food, as evidenced by the brand’s strong growth and high adoption and retention rates, even beyond COVID. JAB Ventures is proud to support Gardyn’s development and bring to market credible alternatives to the industrial paradigm of the past, in a way that is better for the planet, better for health, and brings natural art to your home.”

In a phone interview with The Spoon, FX Rouxel, founder and CEO of Gardyn, describes his company’s approach to the home produce-growing world as “hybrid-ponics,” which takes advantage of the tried-and-tested hydroponics approach to gardening with an overlay of Artificial Intelligence. The result for Gardyn is a vertical tower that takes up a small space making it suitable for even small spaces in apartments. Even though it offers a small footprint, Rouxel explains Gardyn offers a large yield. That abundance is governed by technology that provides a continuous supply of healthy greens, vegetables, fruits, and even flowers. The constant supply is critical as fresh produce—especially plants grown without pesticides– is highly perishable.

“Our vision is simple,” Rouxel says. “We want to control such elements as time, pest problems, germinating seeds, and efficiently using such resources as energy and water while creating a beautiful piece of natural gardening.”

Elements such as water and light are controlled using AI and a “Kelby” technology, which is billed as a gardening assistant. Kelby keeps an eye on the individual seed containers called yPods to ensure they are experiencing optimal growing conditions. At this point, Gardyn has 750 seed varieties.

Rouxel says that the JAB investment will partially support future growth in such areas as AI. As indoor home gardeners evolve from using company-supplied yPod seed packets to experimenting with their own seed choices, tweaks to the AI will be needed to recognize these independent plantings and determine the best growing conditions. The financing also will be used to continue to grow the Gardyn community which is an essential part of the company’s popularity. The community is a vital source for individual Gardyn-ers to share growing tips and healthy recipes, particularly for those more exotics greens and veggies.

Gardyn is one of a growing cohort of companies in the indoor gardening segment. Other players include AeroGarden (owned by Scotts Miracle-Gro), The Smart Garden, Rise Garden, Lettuce Grow The Farmstand, Tower Garden FLEX, and other niche products. While indoor gardening isn’t likely to be a zero-sum game, a handful will survive based on price, ease of use, scalability (in both add-ons and seed varieties), and channel partners in the next few years.

Gardyn Raises $10M for Its Consumer-Grade Indoor Farm System

Bethesda, Maryland-based indoor farming company Gardyn announced today it is raising a $10 million Series A round led by JAB Holding Company. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the non-controlling investment, when finalized, will bring Gardyn’s total funding to date to $15 million. 

The new funds will allow Gardyn to accelerate the North American expansion of its consumer-grade vertical farm to meet what the company calls “the incredible demand” it is currently seeing for its product.

Gardyn’s at-home vertical farming system is geared towards consumers interested in growing their own produce who have neither space nor green thumb to do it the traditional way. The farm itself is a compact vertical tower that can grow up to 30 plants at once and easily fits inside a small apartment. Its accompanying software platform, dubbed Kelby, automates the majority of the grow process, including circulating the water and nutrients, monitoring plant growth, and notifying users, via a smartphone app. when it’s time to add water to the console or harvest the plants.

Currently, the device can grow leafy greens, herbs, some flowers, cherry tomatoes, and jalapeños. Customers have the option to also use their own seeds.

Gardyn is one of several companies developing indoor farms for the consumer home, a category that grew significantly in 2020. Gardyn itself said it experienced “double-digit month-over-month growth throughout 2020.” Others, including AeroGrow and Click & Grow, also reported surges in interest over the last year. Aspara, too, reported a spike in sales in Hong Kong, where the company is based. Aspara has since launched in the U.S. market.

“I am absolutely convinced we are going to see in the coming two years a total disruption in the way we grow things,” Gardyn’s founder and CEO FX Rouxel told me late last year. More than ever, there is greater demand from consumers for local foods with traceable origins and sans pesticides. The pandemic ushered in record levels of consumers buying produce directly from farmers; putting a farm in your house is the obvious next step.

For some, that is. Food sovereignty in the home is currently only possible for those that can afford it. In other words, farming systems for the home are still fairly expensive, ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand depending on the company and model.

When we spoke, Rouxel was keenly aware of this point, and that the $799 price tag for Gardyn’s the base model is still too high for many. “We don’t want this to be only for well-off people,” he told me. “It’s important that we find ways that anyone can afford this.”

The hope is that some of this new funding and expansion can go towards making the grow-at-home movement possible for a wider swath of the population.

Gardyn Aims to Make At-Home Vertical Farming Small, Simple, and Stylish

Thanks to disruptions in the food supply chain, panic-buying sprees, and the general uncertainty of the times, growing food at home seems like a pretty good idea of late. Trouble is, many consumers don’t have the know-how to cultivate their own leafy greens and other produce in the backyard. Even those who do often lack adequate space.

A company called Gardyn is addressing both of those issues with an at-home vertical farming system that requires minimal input from the user and can easily fit inside a small apartment if need be. The idea, as Gardyn founder and CEO FX Rouxel explained to me over the phone last week, is to make growing food in one’s own home as simple and straightforward as possible. To do that, the company has built a farm that relies on AI to do much of the heavy lifting in terms of monitoring and maintaining an edible crop of food. Or as Rouxel said, “The system is managing everything for you.”

Gardyn’s system is made up of two parts: a compact vertical tower, which can grow as many as 30 plants, and an accompanying app powered by an AI assistant named “Kelby.” Users only have to order seeds and “plug” the seed pods into the vertical towers. The system automatically circulates water and nutrients to the plants, while Kelby monitors plant growth and sends reminders when it’s time to add water to the garden or harvest the plants. 

Right now, available crops from Gardyn’s site include mostly leafy greens and herbs, some flowers, cherry tomatoes, and jalapeños. Customers can also use their own seeds if preferred.

The system uses what Rouxel calls “a hybrid of different hydroponic technologies,” including the deep water method and aeroponics. (The company brands its approach as “hybriponics.”) By themselves, these different methods have certain limitations in the at-home setting. Deep water, where plant roots are fully submerged in nutrient-enriched water, requires a lot of space. Aeroponics is a great setup for outdoors, but once indoors it requires lighting, which gets expensive very quickly. Gardyn pulled elements from both to create a system that takes up only two square feet of space and doesn’t require any extra hardware. “Within just two square feet, you can produce a lot of food,” says Rouxel, adding that Gardyn’s units have produced “over 25,000 pounds of produce” during the last few months.

That quest to grow a lot of leafy greens in a small amount of space is an area with plenty of competition these days. Farmshelf recently unveiled its first-ever farm for the home, and companies like Rise Gardens and Agrilution (the latter recently bought by Miele) also offer promising solutions for the consumer space.

And while historically, investment in vertical farming has mainly gone towards the industrial-scale indoor farms (think AeroFarms), at-home farms are fast becoming a lucrative area. Investors, Rouxel explained to me, see traditional agriculture as a risky business that’s less insurable because its success is in part dependent on the weather outside. With climate change triggering more extreme weather, investors will look more and more to alternative solutions in controlled-environment agriculture.

“I am absolutely convinced we are going to see in the coming two years a total disruption in the way we grow things,” he says. Chiefly, that will be growing the food in much closer proximity to consumers, whether through at-home systems like Gardyn’s, in-store farms at grocery retailers, rooftop gardens, and high-tech greenhouses. “In future we’re going to have a spectrum of solutions,” Rouxel noted.

Getting these vertical farms closer to consumers and in their own homes will require bringing the price of the machines down. At the moment, Gardyn’s system is roughly on par pricewise with other systems out there that can realistically feed a family of four: $799 for the base model all the way up to $1485 for the “Plus” model.

Rouxel is aware that the cost is still too high for many consumers. “We don’t want this to be only for well-off people,” he told me. “It’s important that we find ways that anyone can afford this.”

Many companies, including Gardyn, offer financing options on their farms now. And more investment dollars going into the space in the future could mean companies have the time and space to innovate on ways to make their system cheaper for the average consumer.

While pricing remains a question, one thing that’s certain is that at-home vertical farming is on the path to becoming a regular part of the kitchen, rather than just a trend. “What we want is to develop solutions that will quickly change the way people access food,” said Rouxel. “We won’t solve everything, that’s for sure, but we want to be part of the solution for how we shape food.”