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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

hydroponics

AeroFarms is Supplying Goose Island UK With Hydroponic Hops

Goose Island UK has collaborated with indoor vertical farming company AeroFarms to craft Hail Hydro’s beer, a brew made with hops grown hydroponically in AeroFarms’ 100,000 square-foot global headquarters in Newark, New Jersey.

The new hazy session IPA joins Goose Island’s Impossible IPA series, a collection of beers using new recipes, techniques, and hops. Those looking to learn more about the new beer can scan a QR code on the can to read about AeroFarm’s hops and take a virtual tour of its farm.

The hydroponic hops plants were grown without soil and submerged in AeroFarms’ patented growth medium and fed nutrient-rich water. Because this method is unaffected by changes in the weather, soil conditions, and any other environmental factors that come with crop farming, AeroFarms can grow and harvest these Cascade hops year-round.

As fluctuating temperatures, droughts, and flooding impact crop yields more each year, expect to see more indoor farming in the craft beer industry and beyond. The industry took off in 2020, as companies like Freight Farms, Elevate Farms, Plenty, and BrightFarms raised large funding rounds and broke ground on major expansions. While these companies have historically grown leafy greens and herbs, some are beginning to branch out to produce crops like strawberries, tomatoes, and cucumbers. AeroFarms grows over 550 varieties of plants, including leafy greens, hops, berries, and tomatoes (and how hops).

The AeroFarms and Goose Island collaboration beer is currently available on the Goose Island UK website.

Red Sea Farms Raises an Additional $6M to Grow Crops With Saltwater

Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Farms has raised an additional $6 million in pre-Series A funding, bringing the total round to $16 million (h/t Wamda). Those leading the round include Aramco’s venture arm Wa’ed, the Saudi government-owned Future Investment Initiative (FII) Institute, KAUST, Global Ventures, AppHarvest, and Bonaventure. The $6 million announced over the weekend follows an initial $10 million investment the company unveiled in June of this year.

Red Sea Farms, which is based out of King Abdullah University for Science & Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, is developing a grow system for crops that relies primarily on saltwater as the primary irrigation input. As company cofounder and CSO Prof. Mark Tester told The Spoon recently, the system works on both crops grown traditionally via land and those grown indoors using hydroponics. The idea is to provide more resource options for farmers in parts of the world where freshwater is less abundant. The company’s technology can use saltwater for evaporative cooling in greenhouses, which could potentially cut a facility’s carbon footprint.

Red Sea Farms currently has three grow sites, all in Saudi Arabia. The pre-Series A round of funding will help the company expand its operations in Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Middle East, as well as explore opportunities in the U.S. “where growing conditions are harsh.”

A number of companies have announced crop innovations for the Middle East region this year, including iFarm’s partnership with Sadarah Partners in Qatar and AeroFarms’ developing a R&D hub in the UAE. Also in 2021, Estonian automated gardening company Natufia announced its relocation to Saudi Arabia. Most of these developments are in response to a rising urgency around global food security coupled with a need to reduce the planet’s over-reliance on traditional agriculture resources (e.g., freshwater, land).

Red Sea Farms says it can cut freshwater consumption of farming operations by by 85 to 90 percent through its grow system.

Little Leaf Farms Raises $90M to Grow Its Greenhouse Network

Massachusetts-based Little Leaf Farms has raised $90 million in a debt and equity financing round to expand its network of hydroponic greenhouses on the East Coast. The round was led by Equilibrium Capital as well as founding investors Bill Helman and Pilot House Associates. Bank of America also participated.

Little Leaf Farms says the capital is “earmarked” to build new greenhouse sites along the East Coast, where its lettuce is currently available in about 2,500 stores. 

The company already operates one 10-acre greenhouse in Devins, Massachusetts. Its facility grows leafy greens using hydroponics and a mixture of sunlight supplemented by LED-powered grow lights. Rainwater captured from the facility’s roof provides most of the water used on the farm. 

According to a press release, Little Leaf Farms has doubled its retail sales to $38 million since 2019. And last year, the company bought 180 acres of land in Pennsylvania on which to build an additional facility. Still another greenhouse, slated for North Carolina, will serve the Southeast region of the U.S. 

Little Leaf Farms joins the likes of Revol Greens, Gotham Greens, AppHarvest, and others in bringing local(ish) greens to a greater percentage of the population. These facilities generally pack and ship their greens on the day of or day after harvesting, and only supply retailers within a certain radius. Little Leaf Farms, for example, currently servers only parts of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. 

The list of regions the company serves will no doubt lengthen as the company builds up its greenhouse network in the coming months. 

AppHarvest Expected to Go Public Next Week via SPAC

AppHarvest’s expectation to go public is fast becoming a reality. The controlled agriculture company announced today that it is expected to complete its merger with Novus Capital Corp., a special purpose acquisition company, which will enable it to start publicly trading on the Nasdaq on Feb. 1.

Special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), also called blank-check companies, often provide a faster IPO process for companies. AppHarvest first announced the deal with Novus just a few months ago, in Sept. 2020.

Since then, the four-year-old Morehead, Kentucky-based company has reached a few major milestones, including harvesting the first crop ever from its 60-acre indoor farm and starting construction on two additional farms in the Appalachian region. 

The company’s massive greenhouse facility runs off a mix of sensors, LED lighting, and hydroponics to grow produce 365 days per year. Because of the farm’s Eastern Kentucky location, abundant rainwater can be used to power the hydroponic system, minimizing resources used.

AppHarvest’s location also means it is within a day’s driving distance of about 70 percent of the U.S. population. This potentially vast reach combined with the growth possibilities an IPO can provide will help AppHarvest further realize its ambitions to make high-quality, pesticide-free produce available at a manageable price point to all Americans, not just the affluent ones.

The company sent its first shipment of beefsteak tomatoes to U.S. grocery stores last week. Meanwhile, AppHarvest said in a recent statement that it plans to construct more facilities across Kentucky and Central Appalachia, with the intent to be running 12 farms by 2025. The forthcoming IPO will undoubtedly aid in this process.

Farm.One Installs Its Mini-Vertical Farm at Whole Foods in Manhattan

NYC-based vertical farming company Farm.One announced today it has launched a mini-farm inside the newly opened Whole Foods Market in Manhattan West. 

Farm.One custom designed the farm for this location. From a visual standpoint, that means the design matches the Whole Foods’ look, while the physical footprint — 36 square feet — does not intrude on shopping space. The farm can hold 150 plants, which it grows using artificial lighting and the hydroponic method. 

It being a mini-farm, there isn’t a ton of variety in the crops grown. In fact, for now, the mini-farm grows only basil, which will be used for in-store pizzas and cocktails. Which sounds about right for a Whole Foods in Manhattan. Today’s press release says the farm will grow about eight pounds of basil each month. Whole Foods’ staff will harvest the plants and, thanks to the accompanying software platform, require little supervision from Farm.One engineers.

Farm.One operates other custom locations at EATALY in Manhattan’s Flatiron neighborhood and at the Project Farmhouse event space. The company will also unveil a new farm in a yet-to-be-named plant-based restaurant in October. Thus far, the company has raised nearly $500,000 in funding.

While growing cocktail garnishes won’t exactly end world hunger, Farm.One’s continued growth across Manhattan shows how varied the uses for vertical farming are getting. Not so long ago, the concept was the territory of large-scale operations in warehouse-style buildings on the outskirts of cities. Now, vertical farms have made their way into schools, restaurants, grocery stores, grocery distribution centers, and, increasingly, consumers’ homes. The more use cases we can see in action, the better we can understand where vertical farming is most valuable as a component of our future food system.

Farm.One has plans to build other mini-farms as well as flagship locations in other major U.S. cities as well as expand internationally over the next couple of years.

Publix Has Ambitious Plans to Get More Hydroponically Grown Greens in Its Stores

Back in 2019, we predicted that hydroponically grown greens would soon become a mainstay of grocery stores in the U.S. We did not predict that a global health crisis would disrupt the supply chain and make consumers hyper-aware of where their food comes from and what goes into growing it, but that’s exactly what happened. The result? Hydroponic farming’s march into the grocery store has been accelerated.

Perhaps no one is pursuing this shift more seriously than grocery retail chain Publix, whose Greenwise brand has partnered with Brick Street Farms to locate a shipping-container-turned vertical farm at one of Greenwise’s brick-and-mortar markets in Florida. 

The 40-foot shipping container (see image above) sits outside the Greenwise market in Lakeland, Florida. Like other vertical farming operations, it uses hydroponics to grow leafy greens without the use of soil or pesticides. Greens are packaged onsite and travel mere feet to reach the produce section of the store.

Speaking on the phone this week, Curt Epperson, Business Development Director of Produce and Floral for Publix, and Albert Gottuso, Category Manager for Produce at Publix, highlighted the advantage of this method over traditional means of getting produce in the store. Most of Publix’ conventional leafy greens are grown in California and have to travel thousand of miles before they reach store shelves. Besides the obvious lower carbon footprint, growing greens onsite also uses less water than traditional farming and means fresher greens on store shelves compared to those that are harvested shipped, and hydrated before they ever reach the produce section.

But hydroponic greens were on the Publix agenda long before the deal with Brick Street Farms. During our call, Gottuso said the company has maintained relationships for years with local hydroponic farmers to sell greens in its stores. For instance, Livingston, TN-based Tanimura & Antle sells its butter lettuce at Publix stores in that state.

“This hydroponic product out of nowhere became our best seller for leafy lettuce,” he said. That in turn led the chain to consider how it could supply hydroponically grown greens to more of its locations. 

Multiple efforts are currently underway. Earlier in 2020, Publix partnered with Vertical Roots on a mobile vertical farm customers could interact with. In March, the chain teamed up with large-scale vertical farming company Kalera.

All of these efforts fit into Publix overall hydroponic program, which Epperson says is still testing different techniques in terms of getting indoor greens to local stores. 

Gottuso added that the chain is expanding this hydroponic program so that every state has a grower with an indoor farm supporting local stores in its area. “Our goal is that every store that we service has a local hydroponic program that can offer an assortment of variety of blends,” he said. 

This push towards local, more sustainably grown greens is happening across the grocery sector. Kroger has a partnership with Berlin-based InFarm, which puts its vertical farming pods in the store’s produce section. And just this week, San Francisco-based Plenty announced a partnership with Albertsons to sell its greens (which are grown offsite in a warehouse) at that retailer’s store.  

Publix doesn’t plan to stop at leafy greens. Though they are by far the most popular product to grow hydroponically, Epperson suggests there is potential for cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers, among other produce types. 

As to whether or not hydroponic farming could ever replace traditional farming, at least in terms of leafy greens, Epperson noted that the jury is still out. “It’s very difficult to get the yield you would get in conventional growing,” he said. Calling it “blue sky” thinking, he pointed to a day when Publix might have vertical farms located next to all of its distribution centers. And that idea isn’t exactly unattainable — Square Roots is already doing something similar with Gordon Food Service. 

The introduction of technology to the greenhouse could also play a big role in making hydroponics more widespread in the grocery sector. Gottuso says technology allows companies to build greenhouses in areas where they historically haven’t been (like the Southeast). These large greenhouses also provide the scale needed to supply the shelves of a major grocery retailer because they are “adept to growing larger amounts of produce.”

If Publix’ ambitions around hydroponics can do likewise and scale effectively, we can expect many more locally grown greens — and other produce types — to hit store shelves in near future.

Unfold Raises $30M to Innovate on Vegetable Varieties in Vertical Farming

Today, Leaps by Bayer, an investment arm of Bayer AG, and Singapore-based investment firm Temasek announced the creation of a new company that will develop new varieties of vegetables best suited to grow in vertical farms. The new company, dubbed Unfold, raised $30 million from Temasek and Bayer in its initial funding round and plans to use the money for building out R&D operations in the U.S. 

Unfold is taking a slightly different approach to the vertical farming concept. Whereas most vertical farming companies focus on developing new technologies to improve the grow process of plants (building more automation into the growing and harvesting processes or finding the perfect light “recipe” for a crop), Unfold will channel its resources into seed genetics to develop seed varieties specifically tailored to the vertical farming environment.

So far, vertical farms typically use seeds developed for other types of grow environments — greenhouses or open fields, for example. Unfold, which has entered into agreement for some rights to germplasm from Bayer’s vegetable portfolio, will breed seeds tailor-made for the vertical farming environment, which uses LEDs in place of sunlight and, typically, hydroponics or aeroponics.  

Speaking in today’s press release, Unfold CEO John Purcell said the company will combine seed genetics with ag tech methods to improve things like flavor and appearance of vertically grown greens. The company also aims to develop seeds that can mature faster and yield more edible product. To start, the company will work on lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes. 

Approaching the vertical farming process at the seed level, so to speak, is the exception rather than the rule at the moment, though Unfold isn’t quite the only company trying this. In Singapore, a company called SinGrow has developed its own breed of strawberries, which it grows on its own proprietary vertical farming racks.  

Unfold’s Purcell told CNA this week that vertical farming is “an important player in the food ecosystem.” But the model has yet to prove itself as a food-growing method that can feed millions and deliver a return on investment. Focusing on seed genetics can help farmers cultivate more varieties of vegetables that taste better and grow faster may provide more answers to the question of vertical farming’s overall scalability and its long-term role in the food system.

Sensei Ag Uses AI Platform and Hydroponic Technology to Grow Food

As the world’s population inches towards its estimated 10 billion people by 2050, finding more, not to mention more sustainable, ways to feed people becomes more and more important. High-tech, indoor agriculture is one solution getting a lot of attention lately, and recently, a new company joined the fast-growing sector. Sensei Ag is the brainchild of Oracle’s Larry Ellison and scientist Dr. David Agus, and the company’s goal is to grow more greens using hydroponics and AI.

Based on the small Hawaiian island of Lāna’i, Sensei Ag has built a 100,000 sq. ft. hydroponic pilot greenhouse that is expected to grow 1 million pounds of food per year. I spoke with Sensei Ag CEO Sonia Lo by phone this week, and she described the company as an integrated solution to indoor farming that uses the best practices in computer vision, germination, and seeding to optimize indoor growing.

I asked Lo about how the company incorporates AI into their greenhouses. She said that their AI platform will act as a data engine that harnesses global grower knowledge, and will create an algorithm for the best-practices in indoor growing. She did not go into the specifics of their platform, but did mention that this would be made available to other growers, and it would be embedded into each part of their agricultural system. Sensei Ag also uses advanced cameras within their greenhouses to identify pests, pathogens, plant health, and uneven growth in crops. The company’s goal is to enable platforms within the greenhouse to make decisions on growing food autonomous of human intervention.

The COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and a growing population has forced us to consider the possibility of global food insecurity. In response, companies like Phytoponics, Element Farms, and Gotham Greens all operate indoor farms that use hydroponic techniques to grow leafy greens. Meanwhile, companies like Verdeat, Rise Gardens, and Seedo offer at-home vertical farming products that allow you to grow leafy greens in your living room. 

Sensei Ag grows cherry tomatoes, basil, and butter lettuce, and Lo said that they will definitely be expanding the crops they grow. They are currently scouting for a location in California or Nevada for their flagship farm, which will be used as a template for rolling out future farms. 

Hydroponics Startup Phytoponics Raises £500,000 to Grow More Than Leafy Greens

Phytoponics, a UK-based company that designs and deploys hydroponic farming systems, announced this week it had completed a £500,000 (~$627,352 USD) equity financing round. The round was led by existing shareholders with match funding provided by the Development Bank of Wales, according to a brief from AgFunder News.

The company designs and manufactures deep water culture hydroponic systems for commercial farmers growing plants in controlled environments. With the deep water culture growing methods, plants’ roots are suspended in “rafts” of nutrient-enriched water, eliminating the need for any soli during the grow process. Phytoponics has its own proprietary design of this method, which the company says is suitable for large scale commercial crop production. 

Phytoponics CEO Andy Jones told AFN that one of the advantages of deep water culture is that it allows for “much more consistent control of the root zone” for plants, which helps avoid oxygen depletion and can in turn generate more plant growth.

Importantly, the company is also trialing its system for what Jones calls “energy-dense crops” such as cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers. To date, indoor hydroponic farming is mostly used for growing leafy greens and herbs, which require less space and resources per plant to grow. That limitation, however, has long called into question the overall usefulness of hydroponic farming as a key part of the future food system. It’s all well and good to say that these controlled-environment farming systems will help feed the growing global population. But man cannot live by basil alone.

One metric that could be key to growing non-leafy-green crops is whether methods like deep water culture actually do save resources. Most companies, Phytoponics included, tout sustainability as a benefit. As yet, though, we have no extensive data about how much water and energy the method saves, nor how cost-effective it is to do at scale. If we want to grow more cucumbers indoors, we need more data about what works and what doesn’t.

Phytoponics currently has a few different controlled-environment farms where it is using its own deep water culture systems to test out growing more energy-dense crops. The company says it will use the funds for further trials of its technology. 

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.