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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

vertical farming

PlantLab Nabs €20M to Open New Vertical Farming Locations

PlantLab, a vertical farming company based in The Netherlands, has raised €20 million (~$23,171 USD) in growth capital to  scale up its high-tech indoor farming operations and expand to new locations, including the U.S. (h/t Horti Daily) The round was led by De Hoge Dennen Capital. 

PlantLab said it would use the investment funds to open more locations and improve its technology. As with other vertical farming facilities, the tech controls the grow environment — everything from the light mixture to the temperature at the root zone of the plants to the level of humidity in the air. 

The company calls these grow environments “Plant Production Units,” and it has been perfecting the model since 2005. Right now, the company operates a facility in Amsterdam. It also struck a partnership with foodservice provider Van Gelder in 2019 to supply chefs working with the Van Gelder.

Since the start of the year, the vertical farming sector has seen a steady supply of investment dollars. Boston-based Freight Farms raised a $15 million Series B round, Elevate Farms nabbed $10 million, and Upward Farms, a combination vertical farm and aquaponics facility, grabbed $15 million. 

On top of all that investment has been a number of announcements for new commercial-scale facilities and a push to bring the vertical farming concept into new markets like grocery stores and the consumer kitchen.

All this activity isn’t surprising, given the times. Demand for vertically grown greens was already up before the pandemic. A couple panic-shopping sprees and a broken food supply chain later, and more consumers are prioritizing things like food traceability, buying locally, and having more control over where their food comes from. How high this demand reaches will depend on the variety of crops these farms can eventually grow (aka, more than leafy greens) and how well they can scale economically.

For its part, PlantLab has new facilities planned for the Netherlands, the U.S., and the Bahamas, among other locations. 

Wilder Fields Turns an Abandoned Target in Chicago Into a Vertical Farm

A large space in Chicago that formerly housed a Target but has been sitting empty for five years will get a new life growing greens, thanks to a vertical farming company. The Chicago Tribune reported this week that Wilder Fields will turn the 135,000-square-foot space into a vertical farm that grows kale and other leafy greens in the Calumet City area of south Chicago.

Once completed, the facility will house seven acres of vertical farm housed in 24 separate cleanrooms, and produce 25 million heads of lettuce annually that can supply local grocer stores. The site will also include a retail spot and education center where local residents and others can learn how vertical farming works.

In the case of Wilder Fields, its vertical farming works with quite a lot of technology. In addition to the controlled environment that regulates light, humidity, temperature, and other factors that help crop growth, company founder Jake Counne has also introduced robotics to the mix. Instead of human workers having to scale the massive towers of grow trays, an automated lift collects the plants. Robotics in vertical farming isn’t completely unheard of (see Iron Ox’s autonomous vertical farm), but it’s still the exception at this point, which makes Wilder Fields one to watch. The company’s new farm will also use cameras and AI software to regulate the grow environment, so it can automatically adjust the aforementioned light, temperature, etc. 

The farm’s location is significant. Parts of the Calumet area are considered a food desert. While the USDA’s definition around food desert mostly relates to a population’s proximity to the grocery store, others include access to affordable, healthy food as part of the description. 

Of course, it’s one thing to locate a vertical farm in a food dessert. It’s another to actually sell the products near residents, at a price point they can reasonably afford. The Tribune notes that Wilder Fields’ greens sell for $2.99 to $3.99 per pack. The retail store that will accompany the facility will also provide an outlet for local residents to purchase greens. The facility will also create about 80 new jobs.

Kalera to Build the Largest Vertical Farm in Texas

Vertical farming company Kalera announced today that it will open a high-tech facility in Houston, Texas in the spring of 2021. According to today’s press release, this will be the largest vertical farming facility in the state.

The announcement follows recent news that Kalera is also opening a facility in Atlanta, Georgia in 2021. The company already operates one in its hometown of Orlando, Florida.

Over the last couple years, Kalera has made a name for itself supplying greens grown via vertical farms to the hospitality sector. As of the end of last year, the company’s HyCube system was supplying the Orlando World Center Mariott resort with greens, and had plans with several grocery retailers and restaurants. It opened a second facility in Orlando in March of this year.

Then, as so many narratives go these days, the pandemic hit, and it’s a little hard to service produce to restaurants that are closed down. So Kalera struck a deal with Publix to sell its greens at 165 of the grocery retailer’s stores. 

“We were very fortunate to be able to quickly pivot and focus more on the retail side and benefit from the slowdown.,” Kalera CEO Daniel Malechuk told me over the phone in April, at the time of this pivot. 

The company didn’t name grocery specifically in today’s release, but given the current situation in Texas around COVID-19, retail seems a more likely destination than restaurants for greens coming out of Kalera’s new facility. Once open, the new site will be able to service not only the Houston area but also Dallas-Ft. Worth, San Antonio, Austin, and New Orleans. 

Kalera’s high-tech vertical farming system uses IoT, data analytics, AI-powered process automation and cleanroom technology in its facilities to monitor plant growth and create the optimal recipe of lights, nutrients, and water for crops. Right now, the company grows leafy greens, which Malechuk said in April take less time to transport. “Other produce and fruit is probably extremely cost prohibitive in dense urban settings and situations,” he said.

The last few weeks have seen a surge of news in vertical and indoor farming, both in commercial-scale farming and at-home devices. AppHarvest has partnered with the Dutch government to turn the Appalachian region of Kentucky into something of an indoor farming powerhouse. Farmshelf launched its first-ever at-home vertical farming until for consumers. And SinGrow, a Singapore-based company that actually is trying to grow more than leafy greens, is getting a lot of attention of late for its proprietary strawberries and vertical farming tech.

Kalera said in today’s release that the Houston facility is just one in a string of planned locations around the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Aquaponics Company Seed & Roe Rebrands as Upward Farms, Announces $15M in Fresh Funding

Seed & Roe, an indoor farming and aquaponics company, announced today it has rebranded as Upward Farms and plans to build a new headquarter farm in Brooklyn, NY to increase production of both leafy greens and fish. Today’s announcement also comes just as the company has closed a $15 million funding round led by Prime Movers Lab. The company has raised $20 million total to date.

The company, which was called Edenworks before it was Seed & Roe, said in today’s release that it plans to open its Brooklyn facility in 2020 and increase production by more than 20x its original facility (also located in Brooklyn). 

That production includes both leafy greens and fish — striped bass, specifically. The forthcoming facility will farm these fish, which it says will be available to those in the New York area by 2021. Keeping the entire operation something of a closed loop, the water produced by fish feeds (which is nutrient-enriched) then goes on to feed the plants in the facility’s greenery. 

Upward Farms provided this handy diagram of the new facility to explain its operations:

It’s approach to indoor farming is somewhat unique in that most companies aren’t yet combining indoor vertical farming with any other type of farming. Though there is plenty of activity currently in the vertical farming space, thanks in no small part to the pandemic surfacing the many insufficiencies of our current food supply chain. Also this week, Hong Kong-based Aspara launched its high-tech indoor farm for consumers in the U.S. Over in Singapore, the government has allocated more than $40 million (USD) to aid agtech and aquaculture startups grow more food locally. Finally, here in the U.S. South, AppHarvest is building a vertical farming powerhouse to feed the Appalachian region.

Because of its Brooklyn location, Upward Farms will service consumers in the New York area for now, including Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. The company plans to expand in the future, though a timeframe is not yet clear. 

Aspara’s High-Tech At-Home Farm Launches in the U.S.

Hong Kong-based Aspara, which makes high-tech, tabletop-sized farming units for homes, is now shipping devices across the U.S. through retailers like Home Depot, Wayfair, and via its own website.

The Spoon flagged Aspara back in January as a company to watch in the up-and-coming at-home farming space because of the device’s small size, lowish price point, and approach to hydroponics. At the time, the company was selling its system, which can fit easily on a countertop, to customers in Hong Kong and in very, very limited quantities via Amazon to other parts of the world.

This official U.S. launch makes the device available to all U.S. consumers. Speaking on the phone today, Rob Alexander, the Owner of Conducted Sales, the sales agent for Aspara in North American markets, said that Aspara has another eight retailers in the works, though he couldn’t at this point use specific names. 

High-tech, hydroponic farms have historically been the territory of industrial-scale indoor farming companies — the AeroFarms and Plentys of the world. But following this past January’s CES show, both major appliance makers like LG and Miele along with smaller startups began to heavily publicize a new kind of indoor farm, one created for the at-home consumer. These devices are typically quite small and meant to feed a single household, rather than supply a grocery retailer. 

Alexander said Aspara’s homegrown system differs from others on the market in the way it tackles the hydroponic element of the farming. It uses what he calls an “ebb and flow” design, where water for the plant roots is constantly replenished from the side unit (see image above), making the water supply easier to refill than many at-home farms. Aspara’s also has sensors that determine nutrient levels in the water, the current level of humidity in the air, and whether a plant is getting too much light. An accompanying app notifies the user when any of these elements need attention.

“It’s trying to give you feedback to create the optimum growing environment,” Alexander said.

Another differentiation: the device is repairable. While that might first sound like a weird selling point (no one wants to buy tech that might break), it actually speaks to how seriously Aspara is pursuing the idea of making its high-tech grow system the kind of kitchen appliance that’s on par with a dishwasher or refrigerator. You don’t throw out a dishwater the second something goes wrong. In the same way, Aspara users can replace parts like sensors and light canopies, rather than having to go out and buy a whole new farm.

The company’s approach recently won them the Green Product Audience Award. 

Price-wise, Aspara is on the lower end of the at-home farming spectrum. The device goes for $349 right now at Home Depot online.

Of course these days you can’t have a conversation about at-home food production without brining COVID-19 up. Since Apsara wasn’t available to North Americans at the height of shelter-in-place mandates, the company wasn’t measuring demand for its product in that region. However, Alexander told me they did see a spike in Hong Kong, where the device has been available for some time. 

My guess is that with the product available Stateside, that demand will surface quickly. Other at-home farming systems have seen huge jumps in demand recently as the pandemic, panic-buying sprees, and other factors have made many consumers question their total reliance on the traditional food supply chain.

Next up, Aspara wants to do a widespread launch in Canada, and also broaden the types of plants its system can grow to include other types of plants, including fruits and vegetables. 

Singapore to Allocate $40M to Help Agtech and Aquaculture Startups Grow More Local Food

Singapore agtech is about to get an investment shot in arm, one that could give the whole world a clearer vision of alternative farming’s role in our future food system. Enterprise Singapore, the government agency committed to startups, said last week it will invest roughly $40 million USD into agtech and aquaculture companies, according to AgFunder News. 

Koh Poh Koon, Singapore’s senior minister for trade and industry, said during the announcement that “Using agritech can help to make [Singapore’s] food supplies more resilient by building a bigger margin of local food capacity.”

Sinapore relies on imports for about 90 percent of its food. As the pandemic has shown us, that reliance on external sources can be problematic if the supply chain gets disrupted. The city-state already has one initiative in place to address this, the “30 by 30” program, which aims to have 30 percent of Singapore’s food produced domestically by 2030. 

The newly announced funding will go towards agtech and aquaculture startups that apply through the Singapore government’s Business Grants Portal. 

Singapore has become something of a hotbed in the last couple years for food tech, especially when it comes to alternative proteins and alternative farming methods. Last year, the city-state’s National Research Foundation allocated $535 million (USD) to increase R&D efforts in cell therapy manufacturing, digital technology, and sustainable urban food production. Food-focused accelerators like GROW’s Singapore Food Bowl program are also emerging as a resource for startups. Meanwhile, individual companies are also developing ways to make Singaporean food more local, from SinGrow’s proprietary strawberries, to Turtle Tree Labs’ cultured human breastmilk.

Those uses of alternative farming and food production could be a clue for the rest of the world about how technologies like high-tech farming systems, post-harvest technology, and raising alternative protein sources fit into the broader picture of the future food system. Many of these technologies are nascent and have yet to prove themselves economically scalable. If Singapore can use them to meet its “30 by 30” goal and beyond, it could provide a blueprint for the rest of the world as the population increases and demand for local food production grows.

Fifth Season Launches a Direct-to-Consumer Program for Vertically Grown Greens

Vertical farming company Fifth Season, which just opened its first commercial-scale farm outside Pittsburgh, PA, announced today the launch of its direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform and a new partnership to assist the company with expansion.

Fifth Season’s farm uses hydroponics, AI, and robotics to grow what the company hopes will be 500,000 pounds of leafy greens and herbs annually. The robotics element is especially interesting because it allows the company to automate tasks on the farm that would otherwise be difficult for humans to perform — climbing multiple stories to retrieve grow trays, for example. Human still work on the farm, but the addition of robotics brings down some of the labor costs.

The new direct-to-consumer program sells the greens grown on this farm to customers via the company’s new e-commerce site. Products include packs of leafy greens as well as BYO salad kits. And as far as pricing goes, the goods are on par with what you would find in the grocery store: $7.99 for two 5 oz. packs of greens and $17.50 for two salad kits.

Since one of the key points of large-scale vertical farming is to connect consumers with more local produce, right now the e-commerce site only ships to the Pittsburg area. They are also available at a number of Whole Foods and Giant Eagle stores.

The company plans to expand its farming locations into additional parts of the U.S. at some point in the future, although there’s no official timeline for that yet. One thing that may help is a new partnership the company just struck with NHL Hall of Famer and co-owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins, Mario Lemieux. According to today’s press release, the partnership will “accelerate Fifth Season’s expansion plans.”

Large-scale vertical farming continues to attract investment dollars. Earlier this year, Boston, MA-based Freight Farms raised $15 million and also partnered with Sodexo to bring its container farms to U.S. schools. North of the border, Elevate Farms just netted a $10 million investment to bring vertical farming to remote, food-insecure areas of Canada. And Singapore startup SinGrow, which just joined AgFunder’s investment portfolio, aims to grow more than leafy greens, starting with its own proprietary strawberries.

Fifth Season itself has attracted its fair share of investments. It raised a $35 million round in October 2019 led by Drive Capital and including additional investors with ties to Carnegie Mellon University, where the idea for the company was originally born. 

What’s Next for Vertical Farming? Proprietary Strawberries and Other Non-Leafy Produce

Agtech investment firm AgFunder announced this week that it has added agtech company SinGrow to its investment portfolio for an undisclosed sum. AgFunder founding partner Michael Dean wrote in a post that SinGrow “isn’t just looking to be another vertical farmer selling leafy greens.” Instead, the company uses a combination of plant biology, hydroponic vertical farming, and other technologies to grow what it hopes will be a range of produce types, starting with its own novel varieties of strawberries. 

As Dean lays out in his post, SinGrow has developed a vertical farming solution that addresses every stage of a plant’s agricultural journey, from breeding to harvesting. (Most vertical farm solutions do not address plant breeding.) It breeds strawberry varieties adapted to humid weather, and has two proprietary strawberry cultivators specifically developed for Singapore’s tropical climate. Both of those things mean SinGrow’s system uses less energy because it needs less air conditioning pumped in to cool the facility and reach the ideal growing temperature for the strawberries.

The company also grows the plants on a strawberry-specific rack it has developed, where the plants grow outward instead of upward. That in turn allows a harvesting robot to to drive alongside the rack and simply snip the strawberries off rather than pick them. 

Why strawberries? Well, first, they’ve been a hobby of SinGrow cofounder Bao Shengjie, who has been cross-breeding strawberry seeds since 2016. That particular fruit was of interest to the founders because it’s difficult to actually get in Singapore, at least at an affordable price point. SinGrow lists expense, poor taste, and an unstable supply chain as reasons strawberries are difficult for the average consumer to buy in that region.

The company has this neat explainer video that delves more into the specifics on how it grows its strawberries.

Singapore also relies on imports for about 90 percent of its foods, hence the Singaporean government’s 30x30 initiative launched in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: Singapore should have 30 percent of its foods produced domestically by 2030. 

On that note, SinGrow hopes to soon move beyond strawberries to grow grapes, saffron, and other crops, according to Dean’s post.

A (very small) handful of companies are also exploring what else they can grow beyond the leafy green. UK-based Phytoponics is trialing a system for plants like cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers. And a while back, San Francisco startup Plenty said it wanted to grow “exotic” produce on its farm Tigris. To date, though, the company’s website still offers only leafy green varieties.

If a company like SinGrow can show others how to use biology, technology, and farming to grow a greater assortment of produce items, it could change vertical farming’s role in our system from an add-on method to a primary source for getting certain fruits and vegetables. It’s early days yet, but the technology looks to be moving in that direction. 

Rise Gardens Raises $2.6M in Fresh Funding for Its At-Home Hydroponics Platform

Chicago-based startup Rise Gardens has raised $2.6 million in seed funding for its indoor grow system, according to TechCrunch. The round was led by True Ventures. 

Rise is one of a growing number of companies making self-contained indoor farms designed not for mass production of leafy greens, but for the average person’s home or apartment. The hardware-software system looks like a piece of furniture, requires minimal setup by the user, and is controlled via a smartphone app. In theory, at least, that means you don’t need a degree in agricultural studies or even a good track record with gardening to grow herbs and lettuces for your own personal meals.

That’s where the Rise Gardens app comes into play. When we spoke in January of this year, Rise’s Head of Product and Strategy, Diego Blondet, explained how the app automates tasks in the growing process a farmer would normally do, such as calculating the temperature of the farm, determining nutrition and pH levels, and figuring out when to water. Rise’s app works with a sensor that automates those calculations and notifies users when it’s time to water or feed their plants.

Blondet also said he believes automated indoor farming will make its way into the design of most kitchens at some point in the future. In fact, that’s already happening, with 2020 so far being a year when startups and large appliance-makers alike have unveiled indoor farming devices designed for the average home. Seedo, Verdeat, the Planty Cube, LG, and GE are all on that list. 

As The Spoon’s Publisher Michael Wolf pointed out not long ago, the COVID-19 pandemic could accelerate average folks’ adoption of indoor farming. The recent panic buying spree reminded us that grocery store supplies aren’t infinite, and that there are glaring issues with our current food supply chain. As Mike said:

“As the coronavirus has forced all of us to think more about our food supply, some consumers have gone beyond just buying a little extra food to store away. Now they are thinking about how we could ensure access to food independent of breakdowns in the system.”

Rise Gardens’ founder Hank Adams told TechCrunch that since shelter-in-place orders landed in the U.S., the company has seen a 750 percent increase in sales. 

Heads of lettuce won’t feed a family of four, of course, but according to Adams, Rise looks at itself as more of a supplement to your weekly groceries, rather than a replacement. Which is, frankly, one of the more honest takes on indoor vertical farming, an industry that’s often been praised as being the future of agriculture but still can’t grow a root vegetable. 

Since leafy greens are difficult to ship because of their delicate nature, they’re an obvious area for vertical farming to target. Few at-home systems currently allow for the volume of greens the average family, or even the average person, would need in a given week. Since Rise’s system is a little bigger as well as modular (you can add shelves to it over time), it could provide a good blueprint for what at-home vertical farms should look like when they start to become the norm in kitchen design.

Elevate Farms Gets a $10M Investment to Build Vertical Farms in Remote, Food-Insecure Corners of Canada

Canada-based Elevate Farms has entered into an agreement with North Star Agriculture Corp. for an initial buildout commitment of $10 million (USD) to bring Elevate’s vertical farming technology to isolated parts of Northern Canada. The two companies will develop a series of large-scale automated vertical farming facilities in the Yukon and other Canadian territories. The farms will produce about 1 million pounds of leafy greens per year.

Elevate uses a proprietary vertical farming system that relies on hydroponics, patented LED technology, and automation to grow leafy greens and herbs in climate-controlled environments. Like other vertical farming companies, the company claims its indoor agricultural methods use less resources (e.g., water) and require less human labor, which is in major shortage in the agricultural industry right now.

The company closed a $1.8 million seed round led by Brightspark Ventures in February of this year.

Elevate founder and CEO Amin Jadavji said in this week’s press release that the buildout of these new farming facilities will bring more food security and nutrition to “particularly isolated and vulnerable regions of Canada.”

Food security in Northern Canada is a major issue, as communities tend to be remote and food distribution is more difficult and expensive than it would be in more densely populated regions. There’s also the fact that you can’t grow produce outdoors 24/7 based on the climate of the area. North Star Agriculture Group, which is based in the Yukon city of Whitehorse, has been especially active in raising the volume on the dialogue about food insecurity and looking for ways to bring more agricultural infrastructure to the region.

While leafy greens by themselves can’t save an insecure food system (man cannot live by basil alone), of all the produce types, they tend to be the most delicate and perishable, which makes them a priority when it comes to providing food locally. 

At the same time, vertical farming is at a point where it needs to prove itself in terms of its ability to provide fresh, local food to surrounding communities at affordable prices. To do that, companies will need to be able to scale to the levels of producing millions of heads of lettuce without incurring astronomical expenditures themselves. 

Up to now, most large-scale vertical farming operations are in or nearby large cities and supply grocery stores and specialty food markets. If the partnership between Elevate and North Start Agriculture Corp. proves plentiful (literally and figuratively), it could be the blueprint for a new use case for large-scale vertical farming, and further evolve the technology’s role in the future of the agricultural system.

Hydroponics Startup Phytoponics Raises £500,000 to Grow More Than Leafy Greens

Phytoponics, a UK-based company that designs and deploys hydroponic farming systems, announced this week it had completed a £500,000 (~$627,352 USD) equity financing round. The round was led by existing shareholders with match funding provided by the Development Bank of Wales, according to a brief from AgFunder News.

The company designs and manufactures deep water culture hydroponic systems for commercial farmers growing plants in controlled environments. With the deep water culture growing methods, plants’ roots are suspended in “rafts” of nutrient-enriched water, eliminating the need for any soli during the grow process. Phytoponics has its own proprietary design of this method, which the company says is suitable for large scale commercial crop production. 

Phytoponics CEO Andy Jones told AFN that one of the advantages of deep water culture is that it allows for “much more consistent control of the root zone” for plants, which helps avoid oxygen depletion and can in turn generate more plant growth.

Importantly, the company is also trialing its system for what Jones calls “energy-dense crops” such as cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers. To date, indoor hydroponic farming is mostly used for growing leafy greens and herbs, which require less space and resources per plant to grow. That limitation, however, has long called into question the overall usefulness of hydroponic farming as a key part of the future food system. It’s all well and good to say that these controlled-environment farming systems will help feed the growing global population. But man cannot live by basil alone.

One metric that could be key to growing non-leafy-green crops is whether methods like deep water culture actually do save resources. Most companies, Phytoponics included, tout sustainability as a benefit. As yet, though, we have no extensive data about how much water and energy the method saves, nor how cost-effective it is to do at scale. If we want to grow more cucumbers indoors, we need more data about what works and what doesn’t.

Phytoponics currently has a few different controlled-environment farms where it is using its own deep water culture systems to test out growing more energy-dense crops. The company says it will use the funds for further trials of its technology. 

Farmshelf Unveils Its First Consumer-facing Vertical Farming Unit

Farmshelf, the vertical farming company best known for outfitting restaurants with its high-tech indoor farms, today unveiled its first-ever consumer-facing product, according to a company press release.

Dubbed Farmshelf Home, the new product is similar to the company’s commercial model championed by high-profile chefs like José Andrés. It’s roughly the size of a bookcase and uses a combination of sensors, cameras, software, and custom LEDs to automatically deliver the correct levels of water, light, and nutrients to each plant growing in the farm.

For the average consumer, that means once the farm arrives, it’s a matter of plugging it into a wall, connecting it to wifi, setting seeds in pods, then remotely monitoring the hydroponic system from a corresponding smartphone app.

Farmshelf Home is available to pre-order through the company’s website. Though it ain’t cheap: the company lists the “exclusive pre-order price” at $4,950, while the standard retail price will be set at $6,450. There is a $100 deposit (applied to the price and also refundable) as well as a monthly $35 fee that covers seed pods, nutrients, and access to the Farmshelf software for monitoring plants. At the moment, those interested only need to hand over the deposit to sign up for a pre-order. According to the fine print, there is no firm delivery date yet.

Three months ago, I would have called the high price point a deterrent for most people. Certainly, the average American family won’t be purchasing a Farmshelf anytime soon.

But those in higher income brackets may. A global pandemic has revealed just how out of whack our food supply chain is and what happens when people panic shop in droves and grocery stores can’t keep up, factors that might justify the price point for some folks. The Spoon’s Publisher Michael Wolf pointed out recently that “As the coronavirus has forced all of us to think more about our food supply, some consumers have gone beyond just buying a little extra food to store away. Now they are thinking about how we could ensure access to food independent of breakdowns in the system.”

Now we have to see whether consumers will pay thousands of dollars to ensure that independence. More at-home vertical farming companies were coming to market even before the pandemic, with large appliance makers like Samsung, LG, and Miele announcing high-tech gardens meant for your kitchen or living room. They range in price from the hundreds to the thousands, though not quite as high as Farmshelf.

Currently, Farmshelf is in a number of restaurants and hotels, including NYC chain Tender Greens, Marriott Marquis Times Square, and the Condé Nast offices. Angel network she1K syndicated an early-stage investment in the company at the end of last year.