Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Plenty

Plenty’s Plans to Shelve Its Seattle-area Operation Raises More Questions About Vertical Farming

Indoor agtech startup Plenty is shelving its plans for a Seattle-area vertical farming operation, according to an article published over the weekend on GeekWire.

Plenty, who also runs a facility in the San Francisco Bay Area, announced plans for a 100,000-square-foot vertical farm in Kent, Washington in 2017 — the same year the company nabbed a $200 million investment that included contributions from Softbank and Jeff Bezos. The Kent facility was supposed to grow 4.5 million pounds of greens annually using a combination of LEDs, sensors, and cameras inside a completely climate-controlled environment.

However, Christina Ra, Plenty’s senior director of integrated marketing, told GeekWire that the company’s farming facility, Tigris, was too tall to fit inside the Kent location and that Plenty had “ceased operations” there one year ago: “As a relatively lean company, we had to just make a decision about where we were going to put our focus and we felt like building Tigris, while also focusing on Seattle as a new and really important market, was something that we couldn’t do well,” Ra said.

Meanwhile, seven former Plenty employees recently spoke with Business Insider and highlighted problems inside the company that allegedly range from unsafe working conditions to the fact that “Plenty’s leadership had exaggerated the company’s capabilities on more than one occasion.”

Plenty will carry on with its planned location in the middle of Los Angeles, which the company recently announced, and it still operates a facility in the SF Bay Area. But as this news about the Seattle operation indicates, what Plenty (or any vertical farm startup) promises versus what it actually produces aren’t necessarily aligning right now.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that refrain around expectation versus reality in vertical farming is one we’re going to hear more in the near future. 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.

While it’s bad news pretty much anytime a company goes under, for vertical farming, it’s also good information to have. As Paul P.G. Gauthier, who started the now-shelved Princeton Vertical Farming Project, told The Spoon this year, we need the stories about what isn’t working (e.g., operational costs, failure to break even, etc.) as much as we need the success stories.

And we need those stories not just to give lessons on how to employ vertical farming more effectively but how much effort (and money) we should even be investing in it as the agricultural industry continues to look for alternative forms of farming.

Plenty Announces a New Vertical Farm Facility in the Middle of Los Angeles

Vertical farming company Plenty announced plans today to build a new farm facility, this one in Southern California. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the new facility will be located in Los Angeles’ Compton neighborhood. Development is slated to begin later this year, and produce will be ready for market in late 2020.

This will be Plenty’s second vertical farm, following the company’s first San Francisco location, which is already in operation and sells greens at a number of local retailers as well as e-commerce grocery store Good Eggs.

The Los Angeles-based farm will be “approximately the size of a soccer field,” use less than 1 percent of the land and 5 percent of the water used in traditional agriculture, and, like other vertical farms, grow produce in a completely controlled environment without the use of pesticides. The new farm is also expected to create 50 new jobs, from growers to technicians to operations managers.

A huge part of Plenty’s mission for vertical farming is taste. Because vertical farming environments allow farmers to control every part of the grow process, elements like water, nutrients, air, and light from LEDs can be adjusted to best suit the needs of an individual crop. Plenty creates a “recipe” of these elements designed to bring as much flavor out of each plant as possible.

Once in operation, Plenty’s Los Angeles farm will grow kale, arugula, and other mixes of greens.

While vertical farming isn’t yet what you’d call commonplace, we’re seeing more of these large-scale operations ramping up for production around the U.S. AeroFarms, which runs a massive facility in New Jersey, raised $100 million in funding this past summer (and also supplies Singapore Airlines with greens). In the Orlando, FL area, Kalera is developing a vertical farm facility that is expected to grow 5 million heads of lettuce annually. Bowery, too, runs a massive facility in New Jersey that supplies greens to the New York area.

Right now, all these companies grapple with questions of how to make vertical farming economically feasible on a large enough scale to help feed significant portions of the population. We’re not there just yet. There are still questions as to how sustainable these farms really are, and no one’s yet figured out the right mix of plant science and money to grow more than just leafy greens. As Plenty and others continue fine-tuning and expanding their operations, they’ll hopefully provide more clues as to the most valuable role vertical farming can play in the future of agriculture.

Plenty’s New Vertical Farm Wants to Put Exotic Produce in Your Grocery Store

San Francisco-based vertical farming startup Plenty today unveiled some first glimpses of its new farm, Tigris.

According to a press release, the farm will focus on enhancing the flavor of crops as well as widening the variety of fruits and vegetables it and most other vertical farms currently produce.

That includes adding not just strawberries and tomatoes to the mix, but also foods that aren’t necessarily standards in the average American grocery store. “There are 70,000 edible fruit and vegetable varieties in the world, and because of the challenges of growing outdoors and putting food on trucks, we’ve been relegated to eat the few dozen that we find at the grocery store,” Plenty cofounder and chief science officer Nate Storey said in the release.

While Plenty didn’t name specifics, there’s plenty of produce that rarely reaches U.S. shores either because of regulations around potential pests or simply the wear and tear travel puts on the foods.

Plenty will probably not be growing cucamelon or cloud berries any time soon, but Storey’s comment does highlight that potential role for vertical farms.

That said, right now the company is still focused on leafy greens and creating the perfect “recipe” — that is, nutrients, climate, and water usage — to enhance flavor. Plenty currently grows and sells things like kale, beet leaves, arugula, and fennel.

The company nabbed a $200 million Series B investment in 2017 from the likes of Softbank CEO, Masayoshi Son, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Plenty’s current total funding as of this writing is $226 million.

In 2018, Plenty had announced it was building 300 vertical farms across China, where the market for vertical farming is significantly increasing.

Tigris, meanwhile, is currently undergoing its food-safety certification. Currently, customers can buy Plenty greens in San Francisco at a number of local stores, as well as online at Good Eggs. Plenty says Tigris greens will become more widely available later this year.

Growtainers Expands with Central Market, Looks to New Crops

For just about a year now, Central Market in Dallas has tested out offering produce that was grown on-site in a Growtainer. Evidently, that partnership has gone so well that Central Market is making the relationship more permanent and expanding it with the addition of another Growtainer.

Growtainers are modified shipping containers that provide a food-safe indoor growing environment. Each one contains a vertical rack system for holding crops, crop-specific LED lighting fixtures, and a proprietary irrigation system. Growtainers come in 40, 45 and 53-foot sizes and are customized for each customer, costing anywhere from $75,000 – $125,000 a piece. The amount a Growtainer can produce depends on the crop.

The Growtainer at Central Market offers leafy greens and herbs grown on-site in a 53-foot container. While he couldn’t provide specific numbers, Growtainer Founder and President Glenn Behrman told me by phone that “demand outpaces supply” for the market’s store-grown produce. “We’ve proven the concept,” he said.

Central Market expanding its relationship with Growtainer helps push the idea of produce grown on-site more into the mainstream. Other players in this sector include Inafarm, which has been installing indoor vertical farming systems at food wholesalers in Berlin. And here at home, indoor farming startup Plenty raised $200 million last year from investors including Jeff Bezos (who happens to run Amazon, which owns Whole Foods).

As on-site farming technology improves and gets cheaper and easier to use, it’s not hard to imagine more stores opting to grow their own fresh produce in-house instead of having it transported across the country.

Behrman says that there are Growtainers all over the world for a variety of agricultural and pharmaceutical customers. He built two Growtainers for the Community Foodbank of Eastern Oklahoma so they could grow their own produce, and he’s talked with both the military and the United Nations about installing Growatiners for them in more remote (and volatile) areas.

One group Behrman hasn’t chatted with is venture capitalists. He laughed when I asked him about funding. “We have no investors, and we’re profitable,” said Behrman. But in the next breath, he said he realizes that his current go-it-alone approach won’t scale. “I think once this Central Market project expands and becomes more mainstream, I will have to look for some funding.”

Until that time, Behrman wants to have Growtainers produce more high value crops. “Lettuce and leafy greens are not that challenging,” he said. Behrman, who’s been in horticulture since 1971, believes Growtainers could be excellent for growing exotic mushrooms that have short shelf lives, or fungi that historically could only grow in particular seasons.

Perhaps after another year or so you’ll see truffles and porcinis grown on-site and offered at Central Market (and elsewhere).

You can hear about Growtainer in our daily spoon podcast.  You can also subscribe in Apple podcasts or through our Amazon Alexa skill.