If you’re like me, right now you have a pot of thyme (or rosemary, or basil) clinging to life on your windowsill. No matter how much I water it or how carefully I place it in the sunshine, I cannot keep plants alive—even simple indoor ones like herbs.
This is a huge bummer because, while I love to cook with fresh herbs, they can be quite pricey at the grocery store, tend to wilt in the fridge within days, and aren’t always of the highest quality. But home growing systems like Grove are trying to help those without green thumbs (guilty) transform their kitchens, living rooms, and empty garages into mini indoor farms.
A model of how Grove’s indoor farming systems would function in the home.
Though they’re not the only ones leveraging IoT to make indoor growing kits, Grove is thinking big to bring home farming systems to wide swaths of consumers. In order to get consumers to install growing systems in their house, they’ve got to a) look nice, and b) deliver good, consistent results. Grove has teamed up with major appliance and furniture companies to check both of these boxes: Blanchet and his team will provide home ag software and seed pods, and their partners will create custom indoor farming hardware to match.
Grove showed off their initial hydroponic home farming system at the Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase in 2016. He returned in 2017 and sat down with SKS founder Mike Wolf to talk about the future of small-scale indoor farming and how he’s able to grow 30-40% of his own food, right at home.
Watch the video and then head over here to check out more videos from Smart Kitchen Summits of yore.
Got a food tech startup idea of your own? Apply for our Startup Showcase for SKS Europe, June 11-12th in Dublin, Ireland.
