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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Infarm

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.

Meet Farmlab.One, The Latest Indoor Farming Experiment From Germany’s Largest Retailer

While we haven’t arrived at a future where every corner grocery has an in-store farming system with rows and rows of produce, it isn’t for lack of trying.

This is especially true for METRO Group, Germany’s largest retailer, who has been experimenting with in-store farming since early 2016.

infarm x Metro | #wearetheinfarmers

That’s when the retailer launched Kräuter Garten (herb garden), the first retail in-store farming installation in Europe. The technology for METRO’s first foray into vertical farming was provided by INFARM, a vertical farming startup based in Germany. Since the launch of  Kräuter Garten in Berlin, other retailers such as EDEKA (Germany’s largest grocery store chain) have since taken an interest in in-store growing.

Now METRO is at it again, launching another vertical farming experiment with Farmlab.one, a joint project between the retail giant and Schmiede.ONE, a German innovation lab focused on future business models that intermingle agriculture and cutting edge technologies such as artificial intelligence.

The project will be managed by James Lindsay of Schmiede.ONE in an indoor lab in Düsseldorf. METRO has provided resources in the form of indoor farming racks from TowerGarden, the indoor farming division of Juice+. The project is starting with three crops to start, which you can watch here via Periscope.

While the project is a modest one, it’s a sign of continued interest in vertical, in-building farming by a large food retailer. In the US, we’ve seen growing interest in solutions from companies like Farmshelf, and just last month we saw one of the biggest investments ever in a vertical farming startup when Jeff Bezos, among others, invested $200 million in stealthy startup Plenty.

A comparison of yields and resource consumption of indoor vs. soil-based farming. Source: Schmiede One

While it’s unlikely that in-store vertical farms could produce at the scale to meet the total demand for fresh produce purchased at a high-volume urban retail storefront, it’s clear that soilless vertical farms produce at a much high rate of productivity compared to soil based farming, which means much less overall space is needed to produce the same amount of produce. With such high yields, one can envision a future where a mix of in-store grown produce combined with other warehouse grown urban farmed food could be enough to meet a large percentage of overall demand for fresh produce.

Vine to Cart: Grocery Stores Use New Tech To Create In Store Farms

While the demand for organic and sustainable agriculture is growing across the globe, the future of fresher produce might be picking it right at the supermarket.

A startup out of Berlin called Infarm is currently working on an “indoor vertical farming” system with the capacity to grow any kind of fruit, vegetable or herb.  Multiple sensors monitor the plants’ health and connected data lets the system know when to irrigate and feed the crops, creating individual ecosystems. In addition to creating idyllic growing environments for each plant, the system is smart, providing the opportunity for experts to analyze and collect data to optimize growth and flavor and potentially predict problems in the future.

“We are able to develop growing recipes that tailor the light spectrums, temperature, pH, and nutrients to ensure the maximum natural expression of each plant in terms of flavor, colour, and nutritional quality,” Osnat Michaeli, co-founder of Infarm, explained in an interview with TechCrunch.

Although vertical farming is already a familiar concept to agriculture, what makes Infarm so unique is their ability to do small-scale vertical farming in customer-facing situations. The company has already found major success after placing systems in Metro Group locations, one of the biggest wholesalers in Europe, and are now being approached by other grocers that want to do the same. Instead of growing produce outside on traditional farms and dealing with the supply chain to deliver it to each store, grocers could invest in InFarm and allow customers to harvest food right from the vine. In an era where grocery stores are trying to remain more relevant to consumers who often shop online for dry goods, InFarm helps grocers turn into a next gen farmers market with fresh from the plant produce.

Investors have also noticed the potential within Infarm as the company recently closed a €4 million funding round which included Berlin’s Cherry Ventures, Impact investor Quadia, London’s LocalGlobe, Atlantic Food Labs, design consultant Ideo, Demand Analytics and others.

Technology Brings Farm Fresh Goodness to Home Gardens

While “windowsill to table” hasn’t exactly caught on with the vast realm of food bloggers and foodies, one of the newest parts of the tech-inspired food revolution involves regular, everyday city folk becoming farmers. Elements of this movement include indoor gardening, vertical gardening and turning your small deck or rooftop into a lush patch of fertile land that yields everything from arugula to Green Zebra Tomatoes.

Urban farming has a place for everyone. Social entrepreneurs like Kimbal Musk, with urban farm-accelerator Square Roots, and Irving Fain, with his IoT-driven Bowery Farming, are jumping into this space. They are focused on testing aquaponics ecosystems which use LED grow lights and less water by using smaller spaces than conventional methods. These efforts produce top-quality veggies sold to restaurants and directly to consumers. For the home gardener, choices include all-in-one IoT-based indoor growing kits from companies such as Aerogarden and tower-garden setups from startup NutriTower.

On the more DIY side of things, consumers that want fresh herbs and greens can dust off an old aquarium. You can start with the purchase of an aquaponics kit like those from Aquasprouts or Grove, or by simply mail ordering some non-GMO seeds and taking an old cottage cheese container from the trash. From there you add dirt and water to your seeds and soon you can watch your microgreens take bloom. If you encounter a stumble along the way, there are countless YouTube videos to help you along. More sophisticated help is available with some smart gardening assistants such as Growerbot to keep track of your watering and soil conditions.

As the space matures, urban and indoor farming are likely to have different trajectories. It is unlikely consumers will move from growing herbs and microgreens indoors to buying a 100-acre farm in Iowa. It also is a longshot that hipster gardeners will buy vacant buildings and convert them the huge vertical farms with robotic water and harvesting devices. For this crowd, it’s more about crowing over those fresh sorrel greens placed on a salad for the next dinner party.

For social entrepreneurs, the endgame is different. Most visionaries in this space come from other areas (primarily technology) and bring science, fresh ideas and a sense of community to their projects. But these techfarmers also bring a keen sense of business and realize their sustainability will need to include some revenue-generating ideas. Some, such as the Square Roots collective, offer home or office delivery of greens, while Smallhold builds indoor farms onsite for restaurants to provide chefs with ultra-fresh mushrooms.

While some supermarkets may be content to hope IoT-indoor farming fizzles out, the German chain Metro refuses to bury its head in the sand. In Berlin, the company houses an Infarm installation at the end of one of its grocery aisles. And it’s not just for show; fresh greens and herbs from Infarm are for sale in the store.

The biggest threat urban and indoor farming poses is to the national meal kit business. One of the mantras for this new breed of growers is to focus on consumers and restaurant in a 10-mile radius. Serving a local community is part of the marketing message from entrepreneurs in urban farming. The vertical move, adding other local food artisans to their retail packages, could result in the sort of immediacy which the Blue Aprons and Hello Fresh cannot match—at least for now.