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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Smart Garden

Thai Real Estate Developer Sansiri Invests In Vertical Farming Startup Farmshelf

Farmshelf, the New York City startup that brings vertical grow systems into restaurants and food retail spaces, has received an investment from one of Thailand’s biggest real estate development companies, Sansiri.

The investment by Sansiri comes a part of a broader $80 million investment across six companies that include lifestyle magazine Monocle, home sharing app Hostmaker, and Farmshelf. According to the Financial Times, Sansiri invested $300 thousand in Farmshelf, a relatively small amount compared to the other investments disclosed as part of the announcement such as the $58 million stake in US boutique hotel brand Standard International.

According to Crunchbase, Farmshelf received a $150 thousand seed round investment from startup accelerators Urban-X and SOSV in September 2016. The $300 thousand investment from Sansiri marks the second overall funding round for the company.

As detailed in the announcement, Sansiri’s investment plan for Farmshelf includes integrating the vertical farming startups products into select residential properties, as well as possibly scaling the business across Asia.

It’s an interesting investment for a company that has up to this point focused on installations in New York City restaurants and food retail. I visited the company’s installation at Grand Central’s Great Northern Food Hall in June and liked how it fit into the upscale food court. Residential properties seems like a bit of a departure for the company, so I am intrigued to see how these might be rolled out within the Asia market.

Long term, these types of developer deals make a whole lot of sense for a company like Farmshelf. Access to both retail and residential developments is not only a heavy business development lift for a resource constrained startup, but the long term success of these types of installations will require a strong commitment from the property holder and business operator.

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.

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.

With Big Names Behind It, Plenty Aims To Rule the Vertical Farming Market

A $200 million investment in indoor farming startup Plenty has caught the attention of venture capitalists and those who follow the emerging world of tech-driven, commercial indoor farming. What separates the San Francisco-based agtech company from other indoor farming manufacturers is its claim to be able to grow everything except for tree fruit (lemons, oranges, etc…) and root vegetables. The vast majority of competitors focus solely on greens, herbs, strawberries and the occasional tomato.

Perhaps of even greater significant than its crop yield are the profiles of Plenty’s new investors. The high profile roster for this latest round include Softbank CEO, Masayoshi Son, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Attached to each new investor comes an opportunity. For example, Son could bring Plenty to Japan and the rest of Asia. Schmidt’s VC firm Innovation Endeavors has CropX in its portfolio which boasts an adjacent technology that offers adaptive crop irrigation.

Bezos, on the other hand, stands out because of Amazon’s recent purchase of Whole Foods. The intersection of Plenty with bricks and mortar stores, home delivery of groceries, restaurant delivery and meal kits is a near harmonic convergence. Controlling a prime part of the value chain that goes from farm to table or farm to home puts Amazon in a prime position to level its competitors in a number of markets.

The implementations of Plenty with Whole Foods run from the obvious to the imaginative. It’s easy to see Amazon being able to offer premium produce directly to customers via home delivery, but it also could use Plenty to draw more people into its retail stores. Taking a page from Infarm, which has its indoor farm in a Berlin supermarket, Whole Foods adding sleek vertical farms to its stores would be a lure to its clientele—a predominately upscale  group prone to loving shiny, new objects. Not only would shoppers take notice of this high-touch addition, the farms would have the practical objective of selling fresh goods to fussy shoppers.

Whole Foods’ profile perfectly fits this scenario. In past years, innovation was the company’s strong suit. The Austin-based chain was among the first premium supermarkets to feature in-store, full-service restaurants as well as bars featuring local brews on tap. Noted for working closely with local farmers, it would make sense for Whole Foods to select local organic growers to take ownership of and maintain the Plenty-built vertical farms.

Whole Foods and Amazon could make for an exciting team in advancing the commercial aspects of Plenty. With Softbank’s Son in the mix, Japan and Asia are a solid target for expansion, but Europe is a far larger and more immediate major opportunity. One sign of that Europe is a hot agtech market is seen via Germany’s darling, Infarm. Infarm’s successful implementation in Berlin also has caught the attention of investors and partners. Now working with German grocery chain, EDEKA, Infarm has recently closed a four million Euro round led by Berlin’s Cherry Ventures.

Showing his astute understanding of the market for its vertical farming technology, Infarm co-founder Osnat Michaeli outlines how her company’s growth has defined the future of indoor farming in Europe and beyond.

“When we started out, we were looked at as ‘idealistic dreamers’. In part, this might have been because we were self-taught and not many believed that we had the necessary expertise needed to invent a new agricultural solution,” Michaeli told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

“The challenge [now] is in finding the right partners. Our initial focus is on supermarket chains, online food retailers, wholesalers, hotels, and other food-related businesses, for whom the superior quality and range of produce — with no fluctuation in costs — makes Infarm an attractive partner. In return, we can reintroduce the joy of growing to the urban population”.

Image credit: Flickr user Euro Slice under creative commons license

Innovative Approaches Bringing Urban Farming To Cities Across The Globe

Across the globe, innovators are working to make fresh, locally grown food more accessible to city dwellers via urban farming.

In Paris, where consumers pay a premium for fresh everything, the concept of urban farming might lead locals to turn up their nose. Agricool, a French startup, is hoping to dot the country’s landscape with shipping containers that are retrofitted to grow plump, juicy strawberries. What separates this startup from others in the urban farming space is the care it takes in developing custom LED grow lights and precise temperature control. With a new round of startup capital, Agrciool is moving from early stage to production mode.

The short-term plan for Agricool, explains co-founder Guillaume Fourdinier, is to have five custom containers in the Paris area selling strawberries, “Our mission is global and we have to go where fruit and vegetable prices are “an anomaly”.  In [places such as] New York, in the Emirates, and in Asia, you cannot find strawberries of good quality at reasonable prices,” Fourdinier told French magazine Les Echos. Once the Paris rollout is successful, the company plans to outsource manufacturing of its container gardens and sell the units globally.

AGRICOOL et la Révolution Hydroponique - Rencontre #05

(ed note: turn on captions and auto-translate to see comments in English)

The fledging company’s roots began in a small apartment in Paris. As Fourninier wrote in Medium:

We were disgusted with the strawberries we could buy in the city. So (co-founder) Gonzague (Gru) and I (both sons of farmers) decided to build a farming system in our apartment. A few weeks later (and really, against all of our expectations) we had 2 strawberries waiting for us. And even more surprisingly, they tasted delicious and sweet!

We were shocked. How did our little experiment, with no preparation, no science, give us strawberries? Ok, only two, but still, real and delicious strawberries! Why does the rest of the world say it’s impossible to grow fruits and vegetables without pesticide in cities? Fear? Ignorance? Laziness?

Whatever, those two strawberries gave us the magic to keep going. 
We wanted more. Much more.

And so Agricool warn born.

Agricool is but one of several urban farms operating outside the U.S., each deploying a different market approach.

In Berlin, InFarm is working with wholesale grocer Metro on operating a vertical farm in one of its supermarkets. Twice a week is harvest time and customers can buy fresh basil grown in this 10-foot-high tech-driven agricultural marvel.

In China, Alesca Life is developing turkey hydroponic container farms which will aid with the country’s lack of arable land.

A Meal from an Urban Farmer by Alesca Life

In Singapore, Panasonic developed an indoor farm that produced leafy greens which were sold to local grocers and restaurants. From its inception in 2014, the 2,670-square-foot farm yielded 3.6 tons of produce per year. With its success, both the size of the farm and its output have nearly quadrupled.

Clean Air Nurseries in South Africa has patented what it calls a “closed-loop water system” called EGGS to grow greens indoors in a short time frame with less water. EGGS is a computer-driven technology that monitors the recycled water as it flows through a series of glasss tubes, while using a hybrid of hydroponics, aquaponics and aeroponics techniques.

No matter what the approach, it’s clear urban farming is beginning to work its way into dense city landscapes as a way to bring fresher food closer to point of consumption.

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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.

Smart Gardens Follow a Familiar Business Path

Entrepreneurs behind the recent raft of smart indoor gardens are following the digital commerce wisdom of those who understand the value of subscription-based businesses. The old, “buy the camera for cheap and we will sell you lots of film” concept has been successful for companies such as Keurig and Nespresso in maintaining multiple revenue streams.

Ava Byte, an Indiegogo project billed as “the world’s best automated smart garden,” may be the most trouble-free indoor growing appliance on the market. The Vancouver, B.C. startup has taken many of the features of its competitors such as Aerogarden and taken them to a new level. For example, the growing pods are soil free and include the necessary nutrients for optimal growth. The kit, with the standard smart garden goodies such as a base and grow light, also has an HD camera to monitor growing and sensors for precise watering. After getting Ava Bytes gardens into the hands of consumers, the company will be able to realize money from purchases of additional pods for about $6 per unit.

AVA Byte: World's Best Automated Indoor Smart Garden. Get #AVAByte Now at AVAgrows.com

Ava Byte also jumps on the voice-based smart home assistant bandwagon by being compatible with amazon’s Echo and Apple’s HomeKit. The company is led by Valerie Song and Chase Ando, a former chef, born out of Startup Weekend Vancouver 2015. Song was frustrated by her inability to keep plants alive in her sunlight-challenged apartment. She teamed up with engineers, designers and horticulturists to develop the smart garden that brings a bit of nature indoors.

Another difference between Ava Byte and others in the market is that it claims to be able to grow more than the usual herbs, lettuces, and small tomatoes. According to the company’s crowdfunding page, it can grow peppers, berries and mushrooms in addition to the standard fare.

The company has surpassed its $30,000 goal by 125% and expects to ship in March 2018.

The smart growing pods are an interesting component of the smart garden space. Even though Aerogarden pods are affordable, there are a number of hacks that show how to inexpensively make replacements pods. Using proprietary growing pods does offer the ability for smart garden companies to license their technology to third parties, but could be a turn off to the DIY crowd.

Going from super high-tech to cool low-tech, another crowdsourced entrant in the indoor garden space is from Urban Leaf and is billed as the world’s smallest garden. The product is a growing pod insert that slips into the neck of a bottle (green or brown preferred). First, the bottle is filled up to the neck with water and the insert is popped in. The pod is filled with additional water and then placed in a sunny spot. An interesting component of this option is that it reuses bottles you already have (wine, soda, etc.) and does not require investment in additional containers.

The company founders are Nathan Littlewood and Robert Elliott. Nate worked in the finance industry before leaving to become a chef and took cooking classes around the world. Rob is a PhD whose focus is on Vegetated Infrastructure. After meeting Nate in 2016, the pair began working on urban food growing systems.

Kickstarter - The World's Smallest Garden

Urban Leaf has an all or nothing goal of $40,000. As of June 14, with less than a week to go, the offering is a little under $7,000 short of reaching its goal.

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The Year in Home Grow Systems

I have a fantasy of plucking juicy, ripe tomatoes from the vine in my garden, snipping a few basil leaves off the plant, and making myself a fresh summer salad. The problem is, I’m not much of a gardener. I’ve killed so many cacti that I don’t even try anymore: My buying a plant is pretty much sentencing it to death.

That’s why I’ve been so excited to see the home grow landscape blossom this year, with tons of systems, apps, and other devices to make growing food at home easier for even the worst black thumb like me.

Here are the most notable happenings and advancements in the past 12 months.

Grow It All

The Edyn solar-powered sensor is perfect for the detailed gardener with a big backyard plot: It sends data about weather, soil conditions, light frequency, and moisture levels to your phone, where you can manage it all. Meanwhile using sensors, the Gro app can also put together that data and even give you suggestions about specific plants. If you’re more of a hands-off person, the Parrot Pot senses the water level in the pot and waters your plant accordingly. These three devices don’t have to be used solely for produce, but they would certainly make it easier to grow vegetables and fruit at home.

Then there’s the FarmBot, which launched earlier this year and is available for preorder now for delivery in early 2017. The open-source home-farming robot plants seeds, kills weeds, and waters plants individually for their precise needs. It’s controlled through an app and grows enough food to feed one person year-round. Sounds like it might be advanced enough to override even my black thumb.

Home farming robot

Home Garden Copycats

Throughout the past year, we’ve seen so many indoor garden systems that we’re not sure how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Sure, they’re cool, but they’re also copycats of one another, which at some point makes all of them indistinguishable.

Ikea launched its indoor garden for year-round fresh produce, SproutsIO kicked off its connected platform and app, Japanese company Foop brought its hydroponic pod to market, and Opcom launched its GrowBox. Still in the development stages, Everbloom conceptualized its grow fridge, Click & Grow raised funds on Kickstarter for its Smart Garden, and an entrepreneur at Purdue has created what’s essentially a Keurig for hydroponic gardening.

Then there are the 7Sensors Grow Box and Grobo, systems both designed to grow weed but that will work for any other plants too (yeah, like we’re gonna care about peppers when pot is in the picture).

All of these are designed for small spaces, perfect for big cities and tiny kitchens. They almost universally have some sort of pod (with or without soil) and an app to help make the growing process easier.

In short, we have a very crowded market with a lot of systems that essentially do the same thing. Over the next year or so we’ll see some of them weeded out, with only a few remaining: It will come down to the best interface, prettiest design, and most interactive and helpful support and community.