When the Farm comes Downtown

As already addressed in another article here on Green Mirror, food waste is a major problem nowadays, even in advanced economies where food logistics is advanced and the cold chain counteracts the spoiling of food from farm to table. Still, even in the EU, 12% of fruits and vegetables end us as avoidable waste (meaning they could have been consumed), which amounts to 14kg per person annually. This might not seem like much but it adds up to more than 6 million tons of food each year. That's about 80 billion apples that never keep a doctor away but go straight to the bin. Another sustainability problem related to food is the carbon footprint associated with growing the greens. Research from the University of Michigan found that most emissions of food are associated with production, and to a lower extent, transport. Naturally, produce going bad in transit and the inefficiencies in production are not going unnoticed and there are companies trying to provide more decentralized but still efficient solutions to the demand for fresh greens.

Infarm is a German start-up founded in 2013 whose mission is to bring food production closer to the people - in their words, making it "100% local". Concretely, Infarm makes vertical farming units inside the fruits and vegetable departments of supermarkets, whose products are then sold directly there. In addition to dramatically cutting the distance from production site to final consumer, Infarm's impact also stems from its vertical farming model. Each Infarm is a controlled ecosystem with a perfectly tailored amount of light, air and nutrients. The farms are connected to a cloud-based farming platform, which learns and adjusts continuously, thus always improving the yield without using any chemical pesticides. According to co-founder Erez Galonska, the farms deliver the crop equivalent of an acre or more of fresh produce on a 25 m2 footprint. Not all of the vertical farms are in stores, an increasing number is found in so-called "distribution hubs", which are larger vertical farming units in cities, but not in actual stores.

An Infarm vertical farming unit

Infarm is part of a growing tendency towards decentralization, in effect reversing a century-long trend of converging production more and more to achieve economies of scale. Staying with the example of farming, since 1975 the number of farms in Germany has decreased by 70%, going from about 900.000 farms to 260.000, because keeping up with lower prices and technological developments required increasing consolidation. But now, thanks to digital solutions such as vertical farms part of the internet of things, farming does not require huge swaths of land anymore to be economically viable. Since most daily tasks connected to the Infarm are monitored and managed by the cloud, the units also do not need constant care like an equivalent patch of soil. This complete shift in how Infarm looks at farming even made TechCrunch define their business model as “Farming-as-a-Service.”

For now, the products selection is mainly focused on salad varieties and herbs, but Infarm definitely wants to broaden its product range. At the moment Infarm is doing research on growing strawberries, mushrooms and chili in its vertical farms. This not only simply represents an increased offering, but also bigger profit opportunities, especially from strawberries compared to most salads.

Here you can find an overview of the plants currently growing in the farms. But even this range was already enough to convince renowned grocery retail giants like Albert Heijn (Netherlands), Aldi Süd (Germany), Kinokuniya (Japan), Kroger (U.S.) and Marks & Spencer and Selfridges (U.K.) to equip some of their stores with an Infarm. In the future, Infarm aims to expand its offering to mushrooms, root vegetables and more.

What is the impact of this?

• Drastically lower carbon emissions associated with producing and transporting the food to the consumer.

• Infarm's food production is also extremely efficient: in addition to cutting food waste, it also involves a large decrease in fertilizer and water (95% less water).

What can you do?

• Check out if you have an Infarm in a supermarket close to you on this map:

Click on the map and see if there is one close to you!

• And of course, share this article and follow us on social media!