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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Infarm

IKEA Tests Vertical Farms in Partnership With InFarm

Furniture retail giant IKEA is trialing vertical farm installations at three locations in Germany, according to an announcement made by Infarm. Customers at IKEA locations in Kaarst, Duisburg, and Munich-Eching will be able to watch the Infarm installation grow dill, curly parsley, and Italian basil in-store starting this week. According to the announcement, the herbs will be used in food served inside the store’s restaurant.

“Infarm’s concept convinced us because we can make the topics of sustainability and healthy eating tangible for our employees and customers in a prominent place in our furniture stores,” said Tanja Schramm, Country Food Manager IKEA Germany. 

It’s an interesting partnership given how much influence IKEA has in consumer furniture trends and retail. By showing off how they can use in-store farm systems to grow food for consumption in-store, IKEA could potentially encourage other retailers to embrace precision grow systems on-site.

That said, the news would be a lot more interesting if this signaled a potential push by the retailer to position vertical farming systems as a new category for consumers. The company has dabbled previously with its VÄXER/KRYDDA hydroponic systems, but unfortunately, the company has since discontinued those products.

But who knows? Maybe with others beginning to launch new kitchen systems designed around sustainable eating, this news signals that IKEA is starting to look for new ways to encourage consumers to embrace hyperlocal and tech-powered food production.

InFarm Plots a Major Retail Expansion Across Canada

InFarm is partnering with Sobeys, one of the largest food retailers in Canada, to sell its vertically grown greens in grocery stores across the country. The Berlin, Germany-based indoor agriculture company plans to be in an additional four of 10 Canadian provinces by 2023. The deal will place InFarm in over 1,000 retail locations across Canada.

InFarm’s original entry into Canada happened in March 2020, when the company brought its small, pod-like modular farms to Sobeys stores, Thrifty Foods, and Safeway Canada, all subsidiaries of the Empire Company. These smaller farms can be placed directly in the produce section of a grocery store or nearby, making it possible for retailers to harvest greens onsite and sell them directly to consumers faster.  

For InFarm, this most recently announced expansion also means constructing more of its InFarm Growing Centers, which the company says are “growth, production and distribution hubs” that also hold high-capacity vertical farms. The company first announced these centers at the beginning of 2021, saying it had 15 of them either planned or under construction across major urban centers.

Modularity is the underlying principle behind both the pod farms in produce sections and the larger Growing Centers. The size of these farms can change depending on where they are located. As InFarm CEO Erez Galonska told The Spoon earlier this month, this modularity allows the company to respond to demand faster in any given area since it takes less time to launch a smaller farm compared to some of the industrial-sized operations out there. “If you think of larger-scale farms, they require a lot of upfront investment and can take some time to set up,” he said. “We took a modular approach to help address this, reducing the amount of cash needed to start operations and speeding up the process.”

In today’s announcement, InFarm said that its new deal with Sobeys comes in response to demand, and that it will increase production volume in Canada by sevenfold. New Growing Centers are planned for Calgary, Halifax, and Winnipeg. A site in Hamilton, Ontario will eventually host InFarm’s largest Growing Center in North America.  

Over the next five years, InFarm plans to expand its selection of produce to include tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, mushrooms, salads and potted plants. The company plans to have 100 growing centers in operation by 2025.

InFarm Bets on Modular for the Future of CEA Growing

Much of the recent news (and investment dollars) in vertical farming has centered on massive, stationary plant factories that produce pounds of leafy greens in the millions. 

Bucking this norm — and possibly building a new one for indoor agriculture in the process — is a company called InFarm. Those that follow indoor ag developments closely will be familiar with the name, and may even have purchased greens at one of the stores where the company keeps its farms.

The Berlin, Germany-based company, founded in 2013, has long been known for its small, pod-like hydroponic farms it installs in grocery stores in restaurants. Greens can be harvested onsite — a major advantage when it comes to leafy greens, which are delicate and often get harmed during shipping and distribution. These mini-farms are currently in a few hundred locations around the world.

Earlier this year, the company also launched the first of a planned 15 InFarm Growing Center facilities. Each of these will produce the equivalent of 10,000 square meters of farmland, which is 1 hectare or about 2.47 acres in traditional farmland.  

Modularity is a key component of both concepts, as is the idea of a decentralized network of farms that share data with a main hub. Right now, the norm for vertical farming tends towards large, warehouse-sized farms that are stationary and can therefore only serve certain regions. Typically, companies like West Coast-based Plenty or AeroFarms in the Northeast and Kalera in the South distribute their greens to grocery retailers within a certain distance, usually no more than one day’s drive. If these companies want to expand to new markets, another lengthy construction must be planned and executed.

InFarm’s pods don’t go up overnight, but as CEO Erez Galonska explained to The Spoon recently, the company can respond more quickly to demand in any given area because of the pods’ modular design. For example, a farm might be built and operating within six weeks, versus eighteen months for a larger, less mobile build like those of other vertical farm companies.

Size-wise, InFarm’s units are anywhere between 30 and 100 feet tall. At maximum capacity, they can produce more than 500,000 plants per year. For now, crops are largely in the leafy greens space, though InFarm did recently say it is expanding its crop capabilities to mushrooms, tomatoes, and chilis. Galonska says the company has more than 75 products, and eventually wants “to fulfill our ultimate goal of offering the whole vegetable and fruit baskets.”

Leafy greens require fewer inputs (water, energy) than other vegetables to grow, which is one of the reasons they’re such a popular crop. And as was recently explained by World Wildlife Fund, energy consumption is still a major hurdle (among others) for indoor farming, and one reason the sector hasn’t moved far beyond leafy greens.

Collecting more data on plant growth and optimal growing conditions could help companies like InFarm eventually lower costs. It’s one of the reasons we see more and more indoor farming companies now talk about their “network,” where all farms are connected to the same network and feed data on plant growth back to the main system. InFarm’s units connect to the company’s HQ via the cloud and generate billions of data points that inform InFarm research and production. 

“The most important factor is the quantity and quality of the data that we are able to collect and generate insights from,” says Galonska. “Embedded in each and every one of our farms are more than 75 lab-grade sensors. Using hyperspectral cameras and scanning lasers, we track growth speed, photosynthesis activity and stress responses of our crops, giving real time biofeed back to how our plants are doing.”

He adds that his company has seen an 82 percent reduction in unit costs since 2018 and a 240 percent improvement in yield. The challenge, of course, will be continuing to get those gains as the company widens its crop varieties outside of the leafy green realm.

Galonska agrees that vertical farming is still a fairly capital-intensive business, which is another reason InFarm has chosen a de-centralized network for its business. “If you think of larger-scale farms, they require a lot of upfront investment and can take some time to set up,” he says. “We took a modular approach to help address this, reducing the amount of cash needed to start operations and speeding up the process.”

InFarm to Launch a Network of Commercial-Scale ‘Modular’ Indoor Farms

InFarm, a company best known for bringing modular hydroponic farming units to grocery stores, today introduced its Growing Center facility, a combination high-capacity farm and distribution center. The company plans to build out 100 of these facilities by 2025 in major cities all over the world, with the total amounting to 1.5 million square meters of farmland, according to a company press release.

Berlin, Germany-based InFarm already operates a network of smaller, cloud-connected hydroponic farms across the world. These modular units are typically found in the produce section of major grocery retailers, from Marks & Spencer in the UK to Kroger in the U.S. to Aldi in Germany. The pod-like farms are modular, meaning they can vary in size depending on location. And because the leafy greens inside the farms are grown on-site, the buying public gets access to more freshly harvested produce that hasn’t traveled the length of a country to reach store shelves.

With its Growing Center initiative, InFarm is essentially scaling up the modular-farm concept. Dozens of InFarm’s modular units, each between 10 and 18 meters (about 33 to 59 feet) high, make up one Growing Center. InFarm says these facilities take six weeks to build and will be able to generate “the crop-equivalent of 10,000 m2 of farmland.”

InFarm’s existing units in grocery stores are all cloud controlled, so that environmental elements like CO2 levels, farm temperature, light and pH levels, and plant growth cycles can be set, monitored, and managed remotely across the entire network. In other words, if one combination of those elements works for, say, basil, that “recipe” can be replicated across the entire network.

Growing Centers will plug into this network, so that the entirety of InFarm’s units are connected to “a central farming brain,” according to the company’s Chief Technology Officer Guy Galonska. “We’ve collected more than 300 billion data points throughout our farming network to date. These data enable us to perfect our growing recipes and improve yield, quality and nutritional value, while reducing the production price constantly,” he said in today’s press release.

While plenty of smaller vertical farms exist nowadays, much of the attention of late has been on larger, commercial-scale facilities that produce pounds of leafy greens that number in the millions. Last year, AeroFarms, Kalera, Plenty, BrightFarms, Nordic Harvest, and many others saw both major funding and significant expansion. Driving a lot of this activity is that commercial-scale farms can produce more delicate types of produce (e.g., leafy greens) closer to consumers, eliminating the need for lengthy shipping times that can damage plants.

All of these companies promise produce grown more efficiently, with less water and energy required than would be with traditional farming. However, at this point, most data is siloed within each company, so it’s difficult to find a truly universal, objective point of view when it comes to efficiency and energy savings. That doesn’t however, mean the numbers are all a smokescreen. In fact, of all the things the controlled ag sector did in 2020, proving itself as an important and viable part of the future farming system was the most important. While the role of this method will constantly evolve, its presence will remain a given for the foreseeable future.

For its part, Infarm says its Growing Centers will be located “in major urban centers.” So far, 15 are either planned or under construction across, London, Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Vancouver, Seattle, and Toronto. InFarm has not said which of these facilities will open first.

Kalera Picks Denver for Its Next Commercial-Scale Vertical Farming Facility

Kalera continues its westward expansion. This week, the Orlando, Fla.-based indoor vertical farming company announced it will open its newest commercial-scale facility in Denver, Colo. in 2021. 

This will be Kalera’s fifth facility for commercial-scale vertical farms growing leafy greens. The company already operates two facilities in Orlando and is in the midst of constructing farms in Atlanta and Houston, both slated to open in early 2021. 

When we caught up with Kalera in 2019, the company had just broken ground on its second Orlando facility and was best known for serving hydroponically grown greens to the hospitality industry, including the Orlando World Center Marriott resort. One pandemic and countless restaurant shutdowns later, and Kalera had to pivot to keep business going. Earlier in 2020, the company struck a deal with Publix to sell its greens in the grocery mega-retailer’s supermarkets. The company now provides greens to both the food retail and hospitality sectors, a strategy it will take to Denver once its facility opens there.

Kalera’s farms use IoT, process automation, and cleanroom technology to grow leafy greens in a completely controlled environment without the use of pesticides. For now, the company is focused on leafy greens, which require less space to grow than other types of produce, making them ideal for the vertical farming format.

Kalera said in today’s press release it plans to open additional facilities around the U.S. as well as expand internationally.

Its rapid expansion comes at a time when indoor farming, whether vertical or another method, is attracting significant investment dollars. InFarm, which puts its small-scale farms inside the grocery store, raised $170 million in September, and Finnish startup iFarm raised $4 million in August. Also in August, a new company, called Unfold, raised $30 million to build out operations in the U.S.

Kalera’s Denver facility will open later in 2021 and, according to the company, create 60 new jobs in the area.

InFarm Raises $170M to Expand Its Vertical Farming Network

Berlin, Germany-based vertical farming company InFarm announced today it has raised $170 million in the first close of its Series C round, bringing its total funding so far to $304.5 million.

The investment round, a mix of equity and debt financing, was led by LGT Lightstone with participation from Hanaco, Bonnier, Haniel, and Latitude, as well as existing investors Atomico, TriplePoint Capital, Mons Capital and Astanor Ventures. InFarm said in today’s press release that it expects the Series C round to eventually reach $200 million.

InFarm has built its reputation, not to mention its coffers, on the idea of getting fresh, local greens to more cities around the world via its network of high-tech vertical farms. The farms are smallish, pod-like devices that can live in grocery stores, restaurants, and food distribution centers. The farms use hydroponics and cloud-based software to grow leafy greens in completely controlled environments. A big benefit with InFarms’ approach is that, since farms are placed inside grocery stores, greens can be harvested onsite and sold without having to travel. 

Sourcing greens close to the store is becoming more commonplace as companies develop smaller vertical farms. While InFarm might be the most high-profile player in this area of vertical farming, it isn’t the only company bringing greens literally to market. Farm.One just installed its own mini-vertical farm at a Whole Foods in Manhattan and has plans to expand to other stores soon. Vertical Field launched a geoponic vertical farm at New York’s famed Evergreen market in August. Brooklyn-based Square Roots puts a slightly different twist on the concept by placing its shipping container farms next to food distribution centers. The company currently has a partnership with North American distributor Gordon Food Service.

All of which is to say, InFarm may be leading the farm-in-a-grocery-store movement, but it won’t be the only company grabbing major investment dollars for long.

InFarm raised $100 million in June of 2019. Since then, it has struck deals with major grocery retailers around the world, including  Aldi Süd in Germany, Kroger in the U.S., Empire in Canada, and Kinokuniya in Japan, among other places. The company said today it expects its farming network to total more than 5 million square feet by 2025, making it the largest distributed farming network in the world. 

To do that, the company will expand to new cities in future. The new investment capital will go towards that goal. InFarm will also use some of it to complete development on a next-gen version of its farm. 

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.

InFarm’s High-Tech Vertical Farms Head to Canadian Grocery Stores

InFarm is bringing its in-store vertical farming systems to Empire supermarkets across Canada, according to a press release from Empire. The partnership will launch this coming spring and put InFarms’s high-tech farm pods in stores across that country, including at Empire subsidiaries Sobeys, Thrifty Foods, and Safeway Canada. 

Berlin-based InFarm, which raised $100 million in June of 2019, has struck multiple deals with grocery store chains around the world over the last several months, including Irma in Denmark, M&S in the UK, and Kroger stores in the U.S. The company is one of many startups developing vertical and/or indoor farming solutions meant to shorten the food supply chain by growing greens closer to food stores.

With InFarm, that means growing those leafy greens and herbs inside the produce section of stores. The company’s indoor farms come in the form of enclosed pods that use the hydroponic grow method, meaning plant roots are submerged in a nutrient-enriched water supply and no soil is involved. Cloud-based software controls the temperature, watering schedule, and light and humidity levels of the farms, adjusting those elements based on plant type. 

There are two major benefits to this in-store approach to vertical farming. Zero pesticides are used in the grow process, and greens can be harvested onsite, reducing carbon emissions since food doesn’t have to be transported to the store from a distribution center. 

Better-tasting greens is another one of InFarm’s claims. By precisely adjusting light, temperature, water levels, and other elements, vertical farmers can create ideal growing “recipes” for each plant type meant to bring out the optimal amount of flavor.

Many vertical farming companies make this claim, along with those about reduced water usage and carbon footprint. What the indoor ag industry needs next is more public data backing these claims up. With other companies — notably Square Roots and Freight Farms — striking deals of their own to get vertical farms closer to food stores, more hard numbers will be needed to show us when, where, and how these high-tech farms can be most useful in the overall food system.

InFarm will launch a range of herbs at two Safeway stores in Vancouver this spring, according to the press release, and Empire will also put farms in stores across seven Canadian cities.

Coop Denmark and InFarm Partner to Bring Vertical Farming to Supermarkets

Supermarket chain Coop Denmark announced plans this week to bring vertical farming its Irma stores via a partnership with Germany’s InFarm. The retailer says it plans to introduce InFarm’s technology to 35 stores over the next few months, following a successful pilot in 2019. 

Berlin-based InFarm is one of the many agtech startups out there now using vertical farms to shorten the supply chain between farmer and consumer. The company’s high-tech vertical farming pods can be installed inside locations like grocery stores or restaurants, and use a combination of hydroponics and software to in part automate the process of monitoring and managing crop growth. Like most hydroponic farms right now, InFarm currently grows leafy greens and herbs inside its pods. 

Placing vertical farms in stores also means customers get access to fresher greens, since they are harvested on site. In a press release, Søren Steffensen, Irma’s director, called vertical farming the “way of the future to grow vegetables. With this collaboration, we unite Irma’s goal of promoting the most sustainable forms of production and the best possible quality of taste.”

This isn’t the first time in the supermarket for InFarm. The company brought its high-tech pods to Marks & Spencer food stores in the UK last year, as well as to some Kroger outlets in the U.S. And InFarm isn’t the only company trying to grow leafy greens and herbs closer to where consumers shop for and eat their food. Square Roots has partnered with Gordon Food Service, one of the largest distributors in North America, to build its containerized vertical farms near Gordon distribution centers. And earlier this month, Freight Farms announced a partnership with Sodexo to bring vertical farming to U.S. schools and colleges. 

We’re likely a long ways off from the having vertical farms a regular part of every supermarket chain’s layout. But as we noted in our 2020 predictions at the beginning of the year, “putting the farm is right next to your table, or at least at your local grocery retailer, is becoming a popular strategy for providing healthier, more traceable greens to consumers,” and one we’ll see more of in the coming months.

Vertical Farms Will Become Key Parts of Your Grocery Store and Your Kitchen Cabinets in 2020

At this point we can expect vertical farming to play an important role in our future food system — one that goes beyond selling greens to upscale markets in gentrified urban neighborhoods. Exactly what that future role looks like is less certain as we move into 2020. Commercial-scale vertical farms, which grow millions of heads of greens in warehouses and shipping containers, still has a lot to prove in terms of economics and scalability.

While the industrial-scale model continues trying to prove itself in 2020, the place we may see the most compelling developments for vertical farming in the next year is actually in the consumer realm. E. coli outbreaks and bleached salad (among many other factors) have contributed to an uptick in consumer demand for fresher food that’s traveled fewer miles between the farm and the table. If the last year taught us anything, it’s that putting the farm is right next to your table, or at least at your local grocery retailer, is becoming a popular strategy for providing healthier, more traceable greens to consumers, and that trend will continue in 2020.

With startups, grocery stores, major appliance-makers, and others now exploring this area, some of these developments are already happening.

In your grocery store.

Many companies are now looking to shorten the supply chain between the farm and the consumer when it comes to produce. One way is to put the farm right in the grocery store. These aren’t massive facilities growing millions of heads of lettuce. Rather, they’re typically standalone, highly modular pods or units that can be set up right in the produce section. 

German startup InFarm highlighted this approach in 2019 when it partnered with Kroger to place units in 15 of the grocery retailers stores. The company also partnered with UK retailer Marks & Spencer for a similar venture in Britain. 

Another route is for farming startups to partner with major food distributors, as Square Roots has done by building farms near or on Gordon Food Service’s distribution centers. Gordon operates 175 of these across North America, and proximity to those facilities means Square Roots can get its greens distributed to a larger selection of grocery retailers.

In your kitchen cabinets. 

Indoor farms that fit in the home aren’t new. There are plenty of standalone, tabletop, or wall-mounted devices out there that let the average consumer grow greens year-round. What is new is that major appliance-makers are now exploring the possibilities of indoor farming as not another gadget for the kitchen but an integral part of that space’s design. 

We saw this recently when Miele acquired the assets to Agrilution, whose automated Plantcube farm is meant to be built right into the kitchen cabinetry. Just yesterday, LG announced it will be showing off its own in-kitchen smart farm at CES 2020 in a couple weeks.

These aren’t going to be cheap products. Plantcubes cost €2,979 (~$3,300 USD), and that doesn’t include the extra money tacked onto your energy bills each month for things like water and electricity. (LG hasn’t released pricing details yet.) Most likely, these in-cabinet farms will debut in new, single-family homes with ample amounts of space in the kitchen. As more appliance-makers develop products and team up with home retailers (IKEA, I’m looking at you), we’ll likely see the price point on these farms come down and the concept go a little more mainstream. 

Kroger Partners with Infarm to Grow Greens in Grocery Stores

Kroger announced today that it has partnered with Berlin-based Infarm to install modular, indoor vertical farms in some of its grocery stores.

According to the press release, the deal will place Infarm units at 15 of Kroger’s QFC stores, starting with two locations this month in Bellevue and Kirkland, Washington.

Infarm creates high-tech pods that can be installed in locations like grocery stores or restaurants. These pods use a combination of hydroponics and cloud-connected software to monitor growing elements like light, air, nutrients, etc. Right now, Infarm units can grow leafy greens like lettuce and a variety of herbs.

The promise of indoor vertical farms like Infarm’s is reducing the environmental footprint of produce by eliminating the need for transportation. This proximity also translates to fresher food for the consumer as it’s picked on-site.

That all sounds great, but as my colleague Jenn Marston wrote recently, the promise of vertical farming has yet to pay off:

As an industry, vertical farming has yet to prove itself as an environmentally and economically efficient piece of the agriculture system, and along with the hype are more and more stories about complications or outright closures of vertical farms. Already, a company called FarmedHere shut down in 2017, Plantagon went bankrupt in March of 2019, and just recently, MIT halted work on its controversial Open Agriculture Initiative project after reportedly exaggerating results of its vertical farming experiments.

Those disappointments, however, were around larger scale vertical farms. Perhaps Infarm, with its smaller, in-store approach can succeed where others have failed.

Infarm continues to, well plow ahead. The company raised a $100 million Series B round earlier this year, and announced a partnership to bring its vertical farm pods to Marks and Spencer stores in the U.K.

Bellevue and Kirkland aren’t that far from The Spoon HQ, so you can expect one of us to make the trip and pick some in-store produce soon.

Vertical Farm Startup InFarm Raises $100 Million

Berlin-based vertical farming company InFarm said it has raised a $100 million Series B investment. This round was a mix of debt and equity and led by Atomico, with existing investors Balderton Capital, Astanor Ventures, Cherry Ventures, and TriplePoint Capital participating. This brings the total amount raised by InFarm to $134 million.

InFarm is among a wave of startups looking to shorten the produce supply chain through indoor vertical farms. The company creates high-tech pods that can be installed in places like grocery stores, restaurant or bars, so those businesses can grow their own greens and vegetables on-site. The company has a number of partners including Intermarche and Amazon Fresh in Europe.

It’s only Tuesday and it’s already been a big week for vertical farms. Yesterday, UK-based grocer Ocado announced it was partnering with Dutch firm Priva and U.S.-based 80 Acres to create a new vertical farming company called Infinite Acres. Ocado also announced yesterday that it had purchased a majority stake in vertical farming company Jones Foods.

With its small footprint, granular control of resources like water and ability to basically eliminate lengthy (and environmentally unfriendly) transportation costs, vertical farming holds the promise of bringing agriculture into urban environments. However, the sector is rife with failed startups, and the industry is still struggling to scale.

For its part, InFarm says scaling is exactly what it’s going to use its new money for, as the company looks to grow throughout Europe and the U.S., and broaden into Japan.