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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

indoor farming

Nordetect Raises $1.5M for Lab-on-a-Chip Controlled Ag Analysis

Nordetect, a Danish startup that provides portable nutrient testing for indoor and vertical farms, announced yesterday that it has raised a $1.5 million round of Seed funding. The round was led by Luminate NY with participation from Rockstart, SOSV (HAX), PreSeed Ventures and Vækstfonden (The Danish Growth Fund).

The company was founded in 2016 and makes a “lab-on-a-chip” testing device that can analyze agricultural samples for nutrients such as Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium and more. Nordetect’s one-click device and test kits can test conducts multiple tests in a matter of minutes.

For indoor and controlled ag farms, Nordetect says that its test can help growers maintain and balance proper levels of nutrients, water and light for greater crop yields.

There are plenty of ag sensor companies helping farmers better understand their growing conditions. However, soil sensor companies like CropX, Arable and Teralytic are all built for outdoor use. Given the rush of funding that went into and the expansion of indoor farms last year, there will undoubtedly be a number of sensor solutions that come to market for the controlled ag space. With all of that increased funding and expansion, indoor ag companies will need to maximize their yield to prove out the promise of controlled agriculture

Last August, Nordetect’s technology won top honors (and €10,000) at agtech company Priva’s Horti Heroes challenge, which showcased innovative horticultural companies. In this week’s press announcement, Nordetect said that it will use its new funding to commercialize it technology platform and give indoor and vertical farmers in the U.S and Western Europe early access to its lab-on-a-chip analysis devices.

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.

Controlled Ag Company AppHarvest’s First-Ever Crop Arrives at Grocery Stores This Week

Controlled environment farming company AppHarvest announced this week it has completed the first-ever harvest of its Morehead, Kentucky-based flagship indoor farm. The Beefsteak tomatoes harvested from the 60-acre farm will ship to grocery stores this week.

The Morehead, Kentucky indoor farm clocks in at about 2.76 million square feet, and AppHarvest says the facility is expected to produce about 45 million pounds of tomatoes annually. The farm uses a mix of sensors, LEDs, and other technologies to grow tomatoes inside a completely controlled environment. Unique among controlled ag operations, AppHarvest also runs almost entirely off rainwater, an element that Eastern Kentucky has in abundance. 

In addition to the Morehead facility, the company is also finishing construction on two more Kentucky farms: another 60-acre farm outside of Richmond and a 15-acre one for growing leafy greens in Berea. AppHarvest said in a statement that it plans to construct more facilities across Kentucky and Central Appalachia, with the intent to be running 12 farms by 2025.

The focus on Appalachia is a crucial part of AppHarvest’s expansion strategy as it builds out its high-tech greenhouses. Thanks to the continued decline of the coal mining industry, the region’s economy has been hit hard, to put it lightly. AppHarvest’s growing presence in Appalachia has already created jobs and livelihoods for residents of surrounding communities. “What we’re able to do here and how quickly we’re able to move and how much communities want us to be here on the ground, you can’t put that in a pitch deck or capture it in financial means,” AppHarvest’s founder and CEO, Jonathan Webb, told me last year.

The Morehead facility is also within a day’s driving distance of 70 percent of the U.S. population, which means AppHarvest’s tomatoes, and whatever else the company plans to grow in future, will reach an extremely wide audience.

To start, the newly harvested Beefsteak tomatoes will be available at select locations of national grocery chains like Kroger, Publix, Walmart, Food City, and Meijer. Tomatoes will be available in the produce section of these stores, cobranded with produce company Sunset Grown. AppHarvest said the tomatoes would be “comparable in price to standard tomatoes.”

The milestone comes just as AppHarvest, which raised $28 million in August 2020, plans to go public via a merger with a SPAC called Novus Capital Corp. 

Indoor Farming Got Big in 2020. Literally

One thing we can say about indoor farming in 2020: it grew, both in market size and investment.

At the start of the year, a big part of our attention focused on the potential of smaller vertical farms in grocery stores and consumer homes. Writing on the topic at the end of Dec. 2019, I figured we would see the most compelling developments in this area over the next 12 months when it came to controlled-environment agriculture.

There certainly were a lot of notable happenings. InFarm further expanded its concept of placing its pod-like mini farms in grocery stores. A number of companies, including Aerogarden, MyFood, Rise Gardens, Aspara, and Farmshelf offered vertical gardens built for the consumer home. And on that note, at CES 2020, both LG and GE unveiled concepts to turn indoor farming into the next big home appliance category. Manufacturers of at-home farms, in particular, reported spikes in demand resulting from the pandemic and our sudden collective interest in at-home food sovereignty.

There’s one drawback to at-home vertical farms and smart gardens: for now, at least, they come with a price tag that’s too high for many households. See Aspara’s $350 countertop farm on the low end and, on the high end, the $13,000 Natufia Kitchen Garden. When it comes to providing fresher, more local, and affordable greens to everyone, it was actually the large-scale commercial farms that made the most news.

A glance at some of the major announcements shows just how big controlled-environment agriculture got in 2020, both in terms of physical space and investment dollars:

There are plenty of differences in the way these companies approach controlled-environment agriculture. Some rely on vertical farming, while others stick to the greenhouse method aided by automation and AI. Many stick to growing leafy greens; others have expanded their wares to include tomatoes, the aforementioned strawberries, and other types of produce.

What all of these have in common is that they are trying to bring the concept of healthier, fresher food to more people at a price point the majority of households can manage. Many of them also provide much-needed jobs for local communities.

The world’s population is expected to hit nearly 10 billion people by 2050. At the same time, the limitations — and environmental dangers — of relying solely on traditional agriculture get more apparent each year. The past 12 months have shown us that these controlled-environment farms, which occupy millions of square feet and are now producing just as much produce, will be a major part of agricultural innovation going forward.

Stay tuned for more developments in 2021.

 

 

Bowery Announces Its ‘Most Technologically Advanced’ Indoor Farm

Controlled-environment agriculture company Bowery is set to open its largest indoor farm to date. The new facility will be located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, turning a non-arable industrial site into a farm that will grow leafy greens throughout the year.

A spokesperson for Bowery said that the company does not disclose actual square footage of its farms, but that it would be able to serve nearly 50 million people within a 200-mile radius. 

The Bethlehem facility joins Bowery’s roster of farms located in Kearny New Jersey and Nottingham, Maryland. All farms use the hydroponic method for growing. Plants are set in vertically stacked trays and fed a nutrient-enriched water solution that gets recirculated continuously. On the software side, Bowery has a proprietary system, BoweryOS, that monitors plant growth from seed.

Bowery says its Bethlehem facility will be its “most technologically advanced commercial farm yet.” Importantly, it will leverage billions of data points collected from Bowery farms over the last five years to boost this new farms “intelligence” when monitoring plant growth and health.

Other advances include energy-saving LED lighting, more automation of the growing process through BoweryOS, and some innovations in water circulation. The latter will come in the form of what Bowery calls “a comprehensive water transpiration system.” Transpiration is the release of water from plant leaves; Bowery’s system will capture and re-use this water, with the goal of reclaiming “nearly all” of the water used in the growing process.

For the new facility, Bowery is working with the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development and the Governor’s Action Team, both through a Pennsylvania First grant. The farm is expected to create year-round jobs for the area’s farming community.

The news caps off what’s been a big year for Bowery in terms of company growth. Since January 2020, the company expanded its retail presence from 100 brick-and-mortar stores to 680, and said it has seen more than 600 percent growth in stores and doubled its e-commerce presence.

According to Bowery’s spokesperson, Covid was definitely “an accelerator” for some of this growth, though some of that growth is also due to demand for more local, traceable food grown without pesticides — a trend that predates the pandemic. The new farm will help the company further meet this demand, along with advancing the technology component of the vertical farming sector. 

‘Great Challenge Can Expose Great Opportunity’: AppHarvest’s Jonathan Webb on the Role of Indoor Ag

For AppHarvest founder and CEO Jonathan Webb, the role of the high-tech greenhouse goes far beyond providing produce to surrounding locales. Over the phone recently, he went into great detail about his company’s role in not just growing plants but also in providing jobs and morale for the community and playing a part in the solution to some of the agricultural industry’s most pressing global issues.

As a company, AppHarvest, based in Morehead, Kentucky, is only a few years old. But since its inception in 2017, it has moved quickly to make good on its mission of build a network of high-tech, controlled-environment farms that can grow non-GMO, chemical-free produce and at the same time help create a more resilient economy for Appalachia.

The year 2020 has been especially eventful for the company, which raised $28 million in August and finished building out its 2.76 million-square foot flagship facility a few months ago. When we spoke on the phone, AppHarvest had just completed planting of its first crop of tomatoes. It has also broken ground on two additional farms in Kentucky, a 60-acre one in Madison for fruits and vegetables and a 15-acre facility for leafy greens in Berea. Earlier in 2020, it also announced a partnership with the Dutch government as well as multiple universities to bring more research and education on controlled ag into the area and effectively turn Appalachia into an agtech powerhouse. 

Technology is an important part of the plan, and AppHarvest employs it in its greenhouses to grow crops all year and use substantially fewer resources in the process. The company doesn’t build its own technology. Rather, it uses existing technologies on the market that, when put together, amount to a more efficient grow system in terms of both crop yield and cost. Webb cites AppHarvest’s use of Philips GreenPower LEDs, which improve climate and crop control in greenhouses, as one example. 

“There [are] a lot of great technologies that are cutting edge and available and we can use them to be better aligned with nature,” he says, adding that AppHarvest is “trying to use proven technologies that are at the cutting edge without jumping over the edge.”

What is unique to AppHarvest’s approach is its rainwater system. Eastern Kentucky gets abundant amounts of rainfall, which AppHarvest captures and uses for its hydroponic system. This has a distinct advantage over using groundwater, since the latter contains sodium, which leads to agricultural runoff and the need for a system to be periodically flushed. AppHarvest’s greenhouse runs entirely off this rainwater. Webb says that to his knowledge, no other controlled ag system of this size in the world does that.

Webb is quick to point out that AppHarvest’s operations are more than a matter of steel and glass structures and hydroponics systems. “We’re trying to build an ecosystem,” he tells me. That’s one reason AppHarvest is locating its facilities near universities, with which the company can have a knowledge-sharing relationship. 

Even more important is the impact AppHarvest’s work has on the surrounding communities. Morehead sits in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, and is in an area that has for generations relied on the coal mining industry for jobs. Coal mining has been in decline for years, a situation further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. As of May 2020, there were more coal industry mine closures and job losses than at any point since the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower 60 years ago.

“Many of us knew what was happening with the decline of the coal industry,” says Webb, a Kentucky native. He adds that the “vacuum that was created because of the rapid decline of the coal industry was a big reason as to why we looked to be located where we are.”

But great challenge, he says, can expose great opportunity, and morale in the community surrounding AppHarvest is “incredibly high” because the company’s efforts are creating jobs and therefore livelihoods for residents. 

That human element of AppHarvest’s story is, he admits, hard to translate into investor-speak. “What we’re able to do here and how quickly we’re able to move and how much communities want us to be here on the ground, you can’t put that in a pitch deck or capture it in financial means,” he says.

Equally important to communicate is why we need the efforts of those in the controlled ag space.

Most indoor ag companies, from Gotham Greens to AeroFarms to Plenty, highlight the more well-known benefits of controlled-environment farming: 90 percent less water usage, 40 percent less energy consumption. Less talked about are the reasons indoor ag is so crucial right now. The UN has already warned that we only have about 60 harvests left in our top soil. Plowing and over-tilling have increased erosion by 10 to 100 times natural rates, and that’s to say nothing of deforestation, overgrazing, and pesticides that add to soil degradation. Throw in a human population predicted to reach nearly 10 billion people by 2050, and traditional agriculture’s toll on both the earth and the food system start to look a little less abstract and far more disconcerting.

“We have to free up land and water to the wild,” says Webb. “This is a topic we’re not talking about nearly enough.” 

Controlled ag, he says, plays a critical role in this process, and is in many ways the third wave of sustainable infrastructure, after alternative energy and electric cars. Like the other two areas on that list, controlled agriculture will continue to evolve over time as one piece of the overall agricultural system. 

What it will look like in even just a few years remains to be seen. The last several months have seen huge investment dollars and a lot of different companies trying different methods around controlled-environment agriculture, from vertical farming in reclaimed shipping containers to high-tech rooftop greenhouses to planting farms in grocery stores. 

For Webb, analyzing whether one method is superior to another shouldn’t be the focus right now. The point is, companies are building solutions in response to a global problem with profound environmental and humanitarian consequences. 

“We can debate all we want but at some point we have to move,” he says. “At some point you have to leave the analysis behind. At some point you have to build something.”

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.

Swedish Vertical Farming Company Urban Oasis Raises $1.2 Million

Urban Oasis, an indoor vertical farming company based in Sweden, announced today that it has raised 10.5 million Swedish Krona (~$1.22M USD). Investors include Family Offices Pelarhuset, Anteeo, and Yobi Partners Ltd.

Founded in 2017, Urban Oasis built its first indoor vertical farm underneath an apartment complex in Stockholm. The company produces a variety of leafy greens, including kale, bok choi, and lettuce, which are sold at Swedish retailers including ICA, COOP, and online grocer MatHem.

With its new funding, Urban Oasis aims to build its first MegaFarm, which will expand its production capacity by 15 to 20 times, according to today’s press announcement. The new facility is controlled by Urban Oasis’ GreenOS automation software and will be operational by the end of this year for growing a variety of crops.

Funding for the controlled-environment agriculture, and vertical farming in particular, has been downright frothy this fall. Other players in the space getting investment include Plenty, Kalera, InFarm and Unfold. As my colleague, Jenn Marston explained last month:

Less than one year ago, the vertical farming sector was expanding, but a lot of questions remained around the scalability of the concept and how appealing it could be to investors. The nearly constant stream of funding and product announcements in 2020 has sped up that expansion. Part of this is due to, yep, you guessed it, the pandemic. Disruptions in the food supply chain due to COVID-19 have consumers more interested than ever in where their food comes from, and having it grown closer to home is an increasingly attractive option.

With the pandemic still going strong and a month in a half left in the year, Urban Oasis’ fundraise may not be the last of its kind in 2020.

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.

Edible Garden Launches Crowdfunding Campaign for Its High-Tech Greenhouses

New Jersey-based indoor farming company Edible Garden has launched a crowdfunding campaign in the hopes of raising $1 million for its controlled-environment indoor farming operations that supply leafy greens and herbs to grocery retailers across the U.S. The campaign is currently live on crowd investment platform Republic, with $5,075 raised so far and 74 days left to go.

In a press release sent to The Spoon, the company said that funds raised via Republic will go towards further commercializing the company’s greenhouses and expanding its reach in terms of where it sells its produce. 

The company operates a controlled-environment greenhouse in Belvedere, New Jersey that utilizes tech to monitor things like temperature and humidity levels as well as help growers manage crop cycles. The software monitors these and other variables along the food supply chain for greater traceability of its products.

Edible Garden has additional farms nationwide through partnerships with growers, and its greens are already at over 5,000 stores nationwide. Meijer, Shop Rite, Target, Kroger, and Walmart, among many others, are listed as Edible Garden’s retail partners. 

Individuals can back Edible Gardens in different tiers, starting at a minimum of $100. Backers that contribute $250 or more get a Crowd SAFE agreement, which would enable them to receive a financial return “should the company ever sell or file for an IPO,” according to the press release. Other perks include sample of Edible Garden greens, including monthly and yearly supplies, depending on how much the individual invests. 

As with any campaign, backers assume a certain amount of risk investing in companies and projects via crowdfunding platforms, and there is no guarantee Edible Garden will sell or go public and therefore reward this campaign’s backers financially. In other words, caveat emptor.

That said, the last several months have seen a sizable uptick in activity and investment into the controlled-environment agriculture space. To name just a few, Revol Greens recently raised $68 million, AppHarvest nabbed $28 million, and Gotham Greens further expanded its high-tech greenhouses in the U.S. Those numbers are encouraging at a time when more consumers are expressing interest in locally grown food that is more traceable. However, controlled-environment ag as a sector has yet to economically prove its worth as a vital part of the food system, though it’s trekking in that direction.

For its part, Edible Garden will run its campaign until January 16, 2021.

BrightFarms Raised $100M Series E for its Indoor Farms

BrightFarms has raised a $100 million Series E round of funding for its indoor farms, Food Navigator reported yesterday. The round was led by Cox Enterprises, with participation from Catalyst Investors, and brings the total amount raised by BrightFarms to nearly $213 million.

BrightFarms grows leafy greens in its network of indoor farms across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illiniois, and Virginia with new facilities opening up in North Carolina and Texas. According to the company’s website, the BrightFarms’ pitch is that its greens are more tender because they are grown hydroponically and don’t need to “struggle” in harsh outdoor conditions. Additionally, after harvest and prep, they are shipped to stores just hours away, rather than cross-country.

According to Food Navigator, BrightFarms’ greens are sold in more than 2,000 locations and through stores from Ahold Delhaize, Walmart and Kroger. BrightFarms expects to be in more than 15,000 stores by 2025.

Indoor farming has certainly seen a lot of green for its greens, as players in the space have raised a lot of money. AppHarvest, which is building a mega-greenhouse in Kentucky, has raised $120 million. Plenty has raised $541 million, which includes investment and a partnership with berry producer, Driscoll’s. And InFarm, which puts indoor farms in grocery stores, has raised $304 million.

BrightFarms says its approach to growing greens is pesticide free, uses 80 percent less water than land-based farming, 90 percent less land, 95 percent less shipping fuel, all while yielding 10x more leafy greens than conventional farming.

We are definitely in the early stages of indoor farming and we still need to see how all this plays out, but judging just from the frothy market, the future for indoor farms looks bright.

Plenty Raises $140M to Expand Its Vertical Farming Operations

Vertical farming startup Plenty announced today it has raised a $140 million Series D round led by Softbank’s Vision Fund 1. The round also included participation from berry producer Driscoll’s, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. The investment brings Plenty’s total funding to date to $541 million.

The funding announcement comes mere days after Plenty announced a partnership with Driscoll’s to grow strawberries inside Plenty vertical farms. Part of this new investment will go towards that partnership, as well as Plenty’s collaboration with grocery retailer Albertsons and development on the company’s new farm in Compton, California.

Both the Driscoll’s and Albertsons partnerships mean Plenty’s produce will be available in more locations, especially California, where the company is headquartered. The Albertsons partnership, announced in August of this year, will put plenty greens in 431 of the retailer’s California stores. For the Driscoll’s partnership, Plenty will use its Laramie, Wyoming facility to grow the berry producer’s proprietary strawberry breed.

Plenty’s news follows other recent developments in the vertical/indoor farming sector that span commercial-scale farms, at-home gardens, and initiatives in the grocery store itself. Kalera, another massive vertical farming operation, announced Denver as the next city for its rapid expansion westward. Rise Gardens this week announced an investment from the Amazon Alexa Fund for its in-home hydroponic grow system, and last month, In-Farm raised $170 million to expand its network of vertical farming pods across more grocery stores. 

Less than one year ago, the vertical farming sector was expanding, but a lot of questions remained around the scalability of the concept and how appealing it could be to investors. The nearly constant stream of funding and product announcements in 2020 has sped up that expansion. Part of this is due to, yep, you guessed it, the pandemic. Disruptions in the food supply chain due to COVID-19 have consumers more interested than ever in where their food comes from, and having it grown closer to home is an increasingly attractive option.