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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

microgarden

HAMAMA’s Seed Quilts May Be Easiest Way To Become A Home Gardener Yet

There’s no shortage of new approaches to tech-powered home gardening nowadays, but HAMAMA’s Seed Quilts might be the easiest I’ve seen.

I had a chance to talk to HAMAMA CEO Daniel Goodman at the FOOD IT event put on by the Mixing Bowl this past week, who walked me through how the Seed Quilt works.

I’ll be testing out some Seed Quilts myself shortly and have a formal review later (stay tuned), but the initial impression is that Seed Quilts seems remarkably approachable in an almost smart-garden-meets-Chia-Pet kind of way.

When you sign up for a Seed Quilt subscription, you get a Grow Kit to start and three Seed Quilts. You simply put the Seed Quilt in the Microgrow Kit and water it, and in 7 days you should have some greens on their way.

According to Goodman, the Seed Quilts work with ambient light and don’t need any special lighting.

The idea of the Seed Quilt came to Goodman and his partner Camille Richman after they left MIT Media Lab where they had worked on controlled environment agriculture research. While at MIT, the two were excited about the possibilities of combining automation and agriculture but realized much of the fruits (or greens) of their labor would take some time to commercialize given the complexity of the technology. They wanted to make something more consumer accessible, and the Seed Quilt concept was born.

A subscription to Seed Quilts $14 a month all in, which gets you three Seed Quilts per month. You’ll have to buy the Grow Kit to start, which also costs $14 ($12 plus $2 shipping and handling).

You can see Dan talk about the Seed Quilt in the video above.

Amidst Coffee Makers & Cookware, SproutsIO Talks Personal Produce At Housewares

Amidst the coffee makers, cookware and bartenderbots in Chicago this week at the International Home and Housewares Show, SproutsIO stood out as the one and only maker of a connected microgarden.

The SproutsIO microgarden, which allows an individual to grow vegetables in their home without soil or sunlight, is headed to market this year after a successful Kickstarter campaign last fall in which the company raised over $116 thousand. The SproutsIO will retail for $799, a price company CEO Jenny Broutin Farah believes will come down over time as they reach more efficiencies through high-volume manufacturing.

Broutin Farah told me (you can view the interview above) that one of the major benefits of SproutsIO is it grows vegetables much more quickly and efficiently than traditional soil-growing. The reason, she said, is the device can fully tailor growing conditions to each seed type, something which is difficult if outright impossible in traditional growing environments. According to Broutin Farah, SproutsIO can grow vegetables with just 2% of the water required in a traditional soil garden and 40% of the nutrients.

The company, which was one of the 15 startup showcase finalists at the Smart Kitchen Summit last October, will also monetize through selling seeds through a subscription service to user of the SproutsIO device.

You can hear the full interview above with Jenny Broutin Farah.