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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

indoor agriculture

Plenty Expands to More Stores in Northern California, Launches Text-a-Farmer Feature

Vertical farming company Plenty today announced an expansion to 17 more Safeway stores across Northern California, as well as a new tech feature that lets shoppers text Plenty’s farmers directly.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the Northern California expansion is part of the multi-year deal between Plenty and Safeway parent company Albertsons. Through that deal, leafy greens grown in Plenty’s controlled-environment vertical farming facility in the San Francisco Bay Area get shipped to Albertsons stores up and down California. The goal is to eventually get plenty’s produce into more than 430 Albertsons stores, including those under the Safeway and Vons brands.

Simultaneous to this expansion is the launch of what Plenty calls its Text-a-Farmer feature. The tool functions much like its name suggests. A sign in the grocery store’s produce section will display a number users can text questions to. Those questions can be about anything related to Plenty’s produce, from “How should I store my greens?” to “Is your packaging recyclable?” Plenty farmers answer the questions in real time via text with the customer.

The Text-a-Farmer feature will be available at stores selling Plenty’s produce. The idea is to give shoppers more information about their food while they are still in the store.

Commercial-scale vertical farming as a whole, meanwhile, continues to expand, raking in the investment dollars in the process. Bowery, based on the East Coast U.S., recently announced its most “technologically advanced” farm to date, while Orlando, Florida-based Kalera is building out facilities across the U.S., including Colorado and Texas. On the investment front, GoodLeaf just raised $65 million to expand across Canada, Stockholm, Sweden-based Urban Oasis raised $1.2 million, and Plenty itself nabbed $140 million. The latter happened this past October.

Around the time of that investment, Plenty also announced a partnership with Driscoll’s to grow strawberries via vertical farming. Plenty also operates a farm in Compton, California, to service southern parts of the state. 

iUNU Raises $7M Series A for Computer Vision Approach to Indoor Growing

IUNU, which builds computer vision and machine learning systems to add more precision to indoor farming, announced today that it has raised a $7 million Series A round of funding led by S2G Ventures and Ceres Partners.

IUNU (pronounced “yoo-noo”) makes Luna, a robotic system of cameras both fixed and mounted on rails that go on the ceilings of commercial greenhouses. Using these cameras, environmental sensors, computer vision and machine learning, iUNU can measure everything about plants being grown down to the growth rate of each individual plant. If Luna detects changes in the health of plants, it can alert growers so they can take action to improve product quality and yields.

The indoor agriculture space is certainly hot right now, and has seen downright frothy amounts of investment. BrightFarms raised a $100M Series E round in October, Plenty raised a $100M Series D round that same month, and Urban Oasis raised $1.2 million just last month. And just today, Gotham Greens raised $87 million for its high-tech greenhouses.

Beyond straight up fundraising, the indoor farming is also in the midst of a growth boom. AppHarvest is building out the world’s largest greenhouse in Kentucky, and YesHealth Group and Nordic Harvest are building “Europe’s largest” vertical farm.

It’s not hard to understand why there is so much going on in indoor ag right now. The population of our planet is expected to hit 11.2 billion by the end of the century, up from 7.7 billion in 2019. All of those people need to be fed, and more importantly, fed in a way that doesn’t exacerbate environmental problems. With its precision technology, and the ability to move food production closer to consumers, indoor farms hold the promise of creating a more equitable food system.

Unlike the other players mentioned above, iUNU is not a full-stack solution. It’s not in the business of growing its own greens. The Luna system can be used to help make existing greenhouses more productive and could presumably be built into these new indoor farms coming online.