Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Welcome to PMA Takes on Tech, the podcast that explores the problems, solutions, people, and ideas that are shaping the future of the produce industry. I'm your host, Vonnie Estes, vice president of technology for the Produce Marketing Association. And I've spent years in the ag tech sector. So I can attest, it's hard to navigate this ever changing world in developing and adopting new solutions to industry problems. Thanks for joining us and for allowing us to serve as your guide to the new world of produce and technology. My goal of the podcast is to outline a problem in produce industry and then discuss several possible solutions that can be deployed today.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
This season of PMA Takes on Tech is brought to you by Plenty. Plenty is an indoor vertical farm that sustainably grows produce using less water and land than traditional farming and no pesticides or GMOs. The farm is able to grow peak season, flavorful food year round, and deliver fresh produce to its retail partners daily. Plenty's proprietary towers and intelligent platform make it the only vertical farm that can grow multiple crops with consistently superior flavors and yield.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Hello, we have a great episode for you all on AeroFarms. Roger Buelow, CTO and Stacy Kimmel, VP of R&D dig deep into the origin story of AeroFarms and its culture. They talk about the company's beginning at a kitchen table at a nightclub in New Jersey to building the largest R&D indoor vertical farm in UAE and the new farm expansion to Virginia. We talk a lot about the partnerships and collaborations AeroFarms is in that allows for the company to move more quickly using the knowledge and technology of their partners. Let's jump into the conversation with Roger and Stacy. So welcome, Roger and Stacy. I'm so glad to have you guys here and excited to hear about AeroFarms. So why don't we start with you Stacy and just give us a little bit of your background and your role at AeroFarms.
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
Sure. Thanks, and I'm really happy to be here as well. A little bit about me, I am a food scientist by education, which is a little bit unusual in a farming company, but I have been working in the food industry for 23 years, leading product development, technology innovation for Fortune 500 CPG companies. All food companies have agriculture related aspects to them. So while I wasn't working in farming per se, we were procuring and working very directly with agriculture ingredients. So there is a strong connection there. Certainly, also around the commercialization aspects of what I do, which I'll cover in a bit. But I worked for the Campbell Soup Company and McCormick & Company before coming to AeroFarms. I've been in AeroFarms for about two years now. So at AeroFarms, I lead a team of plant scientists, molecular biologists, growers, data scientists, and research assistants.
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
So my role really encompasses three areas. I like to think about it that way. Commercialization of new products and improving leafy greens so that we're bringing better value to our consumers and our company as we build new farms. We also spend time on new technologies and new categories beyond leafy greens and we'll get into that a little bit with partnerships. That tends to be where the partnerships come in. A lot of times is around items other than leafy greens. Also, as a leader of an R&D team, it's my responsibility, I believe to strengthen our capabilities as an R&D organization. So I'm responsible for developing my team professionally and bringing to them the latest technology in our facilities, both in Newark and in the UAE, which we'll cover in a little bit as well. There's a lot of exciting things happening there.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
So how many people do you have on your team in R&D?
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
I have 18 people.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Great. Fabulous. Well, I think that's a really interesting background and bringing the whole food space into growing the types of products that you guys are producing. It makes a lot of sense. Roger, why don't we move into your background and your role, and then we can start talking and maybe you can start talking a little bit about AeroFarms' overview and history as well. It'd be great to hear all that.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
Sure. That'd be great. Yeah. When I start talking about my career, we'll start with talking about high efficiency lights and then pretty much the second act of my career has been in and around AeroFarms. So it'll be natural to weave in some of the history of AeroFarms when we get to that point. So like I said, my career has been one centered around high efficiency. And I grew up in the auto industry in Detroit and then worked at GE Lighting and made the most efficient lights there. That turned into an opportunity to go into the startup world with a company that was eventually called Energy Focus, where I served as the CTO and made very high efficiency lights for commercial buildings, made the most efficient lights for the U.S. Military, and then also the most efficient solar cells for the U.S. Military.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
So it was been a career where we'd bring together 10 to 20 scientists or engineers to really push the limits, break the records of high efficiency lights, high efficiency solar, and now I get to work on what's the most efficient way to grow high flavor plants and highly nutritious plants? So at the same time, I was supplying the U.S. Navy with lights out the front door. I like to say I was helping out AeroFarms out the back door. So we had an investor that invested both in Energy Focus and in AeroFarms, that investor brought me and Ed Harwood, one of our founders together in 2009 and that's when I started helping out AeroFarms. So sometimes that meant driving to Ithaca, New York to help Ed out in person. A lot of times it meant pushing LED lights out the back door to help improve the overall efficiency of AeroFarms growing systems.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
At that time, AeroFarms was selling farms. So now let's weave in how this matches up with AeroFarms' history. AeroFarms started with Ed Harwood was part of it. Started a company called AeroFarms where he was finding a way to grow aeroponically different than hydroponically. Dr. Harwood had been the CEO of dairy equipment companies, and at the time, he was working in extensions services out of Cornell. He saw people growing hydroponically and thought that maybe there's a better way. So he started to live the American inventor story where you're on your kitchen table and you're figuring out different ways to make an aeroponic mist. And now, you're taking over your whole dining room and then he took over his garage.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
This was in 2010 or so, or when was this?
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
This would be 2004, 2005.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Oh, wow. So really early. No one was even thinking about this stuff. That's [crosstalk 00:08:13].
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
Oh yeah. Ed was definitely trailblazer. Somewhere around 2009, Ed and I met up. At that point, he had a facility outside of his house and sometimes he had some employees that were working with him. Sometimes it was just him. On one day, it was just him, but he was trapped under the machine and he just was waiting for his wife to realize that he hadn’t home so she would come and rescue him. But there's the American inventor story. It is a lot of creativity and a lot of finding what's the right application and what's the right answer to a whole new field. And at that time, what Ed was focused on was creating the aeroponic mist in different ways to deliver the nutrient solutions.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
And in 2009, on the day that we met, we worked out on a literal napkin, the efficiency of LEDs and how by 2017, the world could be our oyster if we marched along a particular efficiency curve. We did between 2009, 2017. We did march on that curve and that helped us to start shipping to all the places we ship today. But that's jumping too far ahead. I have to go back to 2009, because at around that time, our other two co-founders, Marc Oshima and David Rosenberg, they had a company called Just Greens and their company and Ed's company merged together to become Just Greens, doing business as AeroFarms, since we switched back and forth between which brand were using different times. But most people know us as AeroFarms. David and Marc brought a view of going large with AeroFarms.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
So instead of selling the farms like Ed had been doing up until that point, their point was, "Well, let's sell the produce." And part of the reason was that we needed to control our own destiny from an operations point of view, because we were still inventing how these systems go together, we were still inventing how the... What kind of data we wanted to collect and working out what really worked the best in terms of our different algorithms. I joined up as an employee in 2014. So I was... Things had gone far enough with AeroFarms. I had done as much as I could as a friend and then as an advisor and signed up to help go to the next level. There was about eight of us at that time and we were operating out of a converted nightclub really in Newark.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
So eight of us sat on the mezzanine of the nightclub and we looked down as we were onto the floor of the nightclub, where we were building up the next generation of the farms. And at that point right now, instead of the American inventor story, we were living the venture backed company story. So that meant every year, year and a half, siding what risk we wanted to reduce and putting together a plan and a focused effort to handle that, raising money to achieve that, and if we had reduced the risk and if we had moved the company forward, a plan to raise the next round. And that's worked really well for us. So at that converted nightclub, we doubled our yields and that was enough for us to be able to reduce a certain amount of risk and open up a pilot facility.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
And at that pilot facility then, we boosted our yields again, and we showed that we could hit all of our food safety metrics and third-party certifications. We showed that people were willing to pay the price that we expected for our product, and we showed that we could hit the yields using a staff of farm workers that we are training up in a way that could be repeatable going forward. We raised another round of money and we set up our first production facility still in Newark, New Jersey. If you see videos of AeroFarms online, that's where you're looking. You're peeking into. You're taking a look at our facility at 212 Rome Street and seeing how we are producing baby leafy greens and microgreens every day of the week and in a system that is... It's the third generation along of our grow towers, but a lot of those videos that you see are four or five years old, and we've progressed quite a bit since then as we're heading into the future.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
So I'll point out, since those days in the nightclub, our efficiency's gone up by about a factor of six to eight in terms of yields and energy inputs. I think eight probably is a fair number and we're not done. So we're still today, still concentrating on how we can do things more efficiently, still today, we're concentrating on how we can make our plants happier and healthier and marching along really in a path that Ed Harwood set out in 2004. And I'm proud to be able to continue on with some of the legacy that Ed had laid out for us.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Great. Thank you. That is such a great origin story. I heard a story that Bruce Taylor of Taylor Farms told just a couple of days ago, he was talking about the first time he visited AeroFarms was in that nightclub, and he said, "I go into this place and the disco ball is still up." So it's a really great story.
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
On one of our buildings, we still have... It's primarily our research facility, but we still have a lot of the original paint and decoration from paintball court. So there's all this crazy graffiti-looking stuff all over the wall, and I was talking to my team a few weeks ago and we're putting in a... Upgrading a space there to be a little bit more like a laboratory space so that we can do some different types of bench work there. And I said, well, "Do you want to paint the room?" And they said, "Well, I don't know. There's good mojo here with this. So I don't know if we should paint the room." And I said, "Well, got it and we can just decide if we want to paint the room." But there is something to some of the aspects of where we work that I think people are...
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
They really feel close to the company, I think because of its roots and the buildings that we work in, they share, just by walking into them, that history. All you have to do is look around and you can see a little bit about what Roger was talking about without even ever hearing the story. So we'll see if we paint. I'll keep you posted.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Yes. Keep me posted on that. Stacy, let's continue with you on just looking at R&D capabilities.
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
Sure.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
What I hear about AeroFarms so much is just how much R&D that you're doing and your facilities and what you're working on. So why don't you talk to us a little bit about that?
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
Yeah, yeah. Sure. So, I mean, we essentially have in Newark, a fully-controlled smart farm. Within our grow towers, we use aeroponic technology. I think Roger alluded to that. This is really where the name AeroFarms comes from. That technology allows us to mist the roots of the plant with fully oxygen, water, and nutrients, and we also have an automated delivery system that we have developed and programmed specifically in-house for our growing system. So that allows us to very tightly control and manipulate nutrients that our plants are receiving in the farm. We also have genetics of the plants that are tailored for growing in our environment and as Roger mentioned, lighting is a really, really important part of what we do. It's a cost and we're constantly improving our LED lighting and all of our lighting is proprietary for AeroFarms.
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
So nobody has it, and we're advancing that technology all the time. So my team is working a lot in the lighting space, trying to understand what spectrums of light we want to use to increase nutrition, advance some of the flavor characteristics that are interesting to us, and we're looking at lighting not just in leafy greens, but some other areas that we've been working in like berries and some of the breeding aspects that you'll hear about relative to our partnerships. So that's pretty exciting to take that information that we're learning in leafy greens and translate it over into other crops. So we grow on a cloth media. I listened to your talk with Nate the other day and it's a bit of a different system. So we grow on a flat cloth media. It is reusable and made from recycled material. It does interact with the plant in a very special way. We've tried so many different growth media. That's also very critical to what we're doing.
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
So it's not just something that we thought, "Oh, let's try this and see if it works out." We've tried many, many different types of growth media, and we're continuing to explore this area and try to understand if there are better ways and better media to grow our plants, and whether that be every plant or for specific plants or for specific varieties. We are starting to hone in on different types of media that are helping us increase our farm productivity. So as you know, just like everybody else, we've got large buildings, we've got HVAC systems, but we're always working to try to understand what precise growing conditions we want to deliver to our plants, and we are also focusing pretty regularly on the ends of the process. So what happens during seeding? What happens during harvesting? So the more you focus on end-to-end process within a commercial farm, the better you're going to get. Every little thing counts.
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
So it's critical for us to not just look at what's happening on the grow towers with the plants, but also think about what seeds are we sourcing? How are we treating those seeds? How are we placing those seeds on our growth media? What happens to those seeds once they get onto the tower? But then also once we bring them off, what are we doing when we harvest that? What are we doing when we package them? How are we packaging them? Are there environments that are better for us to be packaging to increase our shelf life so consumers get better quality? Just a lot of that work, it's all happening simultaneously, and we are... I think the one thing about AeroFarms that as you mentioned, that we know is different is we've got a lot of partnerships and those partnerships, while we have... We're working on different plants, we also... We're able to apply what we know to those plants and we're also able to apply information backwards.
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
So it's great for us to learn from partners. We have a new facility that we're building in Abu Dhabi. So probably a lot of people who follow AeroFarms are familiar with this. That facility is going to be one of the largest R&D facilities in the world, focused on vertical farming. It's 100% research. Really excited about it. We have broken ground, we're building now, and things are progressing nicely. One of my team members was just there, sent pictures, and it's just like a sea of people working in that building, getting things ready for us to start up our laboratories and our grow rooms and put in our pilot farm into that facility so we can start working. So we're going to be employing local talent. We've got a number of focus areas. So plant biology is an obvious one, but we're also going to be looking at speed breeding, analytical chemistry, trying to understand what it is about the plants chemically and from a nutritional perspective and marrying that up with sensory understanding.
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
Automation is a huge thing in vertical farming now. So we are going to be studying the different aspects of automation in farms for both leafy greens and other farms, whether it be in the vertical farm or in aspects of the farm on the front end or the back end, whether it be seeding or harvesting. So we're very excited about that. Roger talked a little bit about some of the other projects that we're doing relative to machine vision, but we'll also be doing some work there. So this is... It's a pretty exciting time to be at AeroFarms because we're committed to this research work, but I'll say that we don't do research for research's sake. We do research because we want to get to a commercial stage or for things that we are commercial, we're trying to improve and make those things better. So it's really exciting work to be doing. And I work with a great group of folks who are just excited about the science every day.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Yeah. I think what's a huge advantage to indoor growing and the type of things that you do is that you're already gathering all that data anyway. And when you're growing outside, you don't have sensors so close and you're not collecting all that data. So you guys can actually make real time changes and really pick up data that is hard to do outside.
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
Right. Exactly.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Roger, do you want to add some to the R&D capabilities?
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
Yeah. Let me... A few things to that. So one thing Stacy talked about the facility in Abu Dhabi, and one of the things that we're finding is working with local partners is it's really working out well for us. So there are plants of interest in the region that maybe in New Jersey is not as exciting, but in UAE, it is. And we have partnership with plenty of U.S. universities, but I'll tell you what? So leafy university, UAEU they're they're well staffed with some really smart people and that's turning out to be a fantastic set of partnerships also. I'll also go for further talking about machine vision. So we talked about the sensor network that's in there and you are right. One of the beautiful things about the vertical farming is you really have ubiquitous sensors. So you can make sure that you've got sensors in all the right places to make sure that you've got a really good view of what's happening with your plants.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
And Stacy's team, the R&D team has also developed different ways of doing machine vision so we can understand what's happening with the growth of the plants by looking at them post harvest, and we've made some great discoveries that way. And now, as we're moving forward, we mentioned we've published the fact that we have a partnership with Nokia Bell Labs and working hand in hand with them, we can set up systems that watch the plants while they're growing and in addition to watching the environmental factors. So I said ubiquitous, well, doesn't get much more ubiquitous than watching every plant every day and watching the environment around them. So that's already yielding great results in terms of paying very close attention to what's happening with the plants, being able to adjust our production systems, being able to adjust our forecasting when things are going better than expected, being able to marsh our resources if there's an issue that's popped up and we're able to pay very close attention to these plants and I think they appreciate it.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Yeah. So you've both mentioned partnerships a couple of times and partnerships and collaborations are important to all companies, but AeroFarms is much more active in partnerships than a lot of the other companies in your space. I think partly because of the nature of IP and people being worried about that. But you guys have done a great job. So what about your culture makes that so? I mean, why do you think you have more partnerships and more collaborations than some of the other companies?
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
I don't know that we do. I'm not keeping score.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
I am.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
I'll take your word for it. So when we lay out our principles at AeroFarms, collaboration is at the top of that list. So we have our set of principles. So communication is important, accountability is important, respect is important, but collaboration tends to be the one that you pivot outside and helps you have a broader view of what you can do on earth. So one way we put is that we want to grow the best plants for the better of humanity. Another way to say the same thing is we want to do the most good with our technology. And we believe that by partnering with others, we can do more good quicker. We can make sure that our technology makes an impact faster.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
So we think that's important to the planet. We think that's important to the company, and we look at it as a way to be agile in this market. These partnerships, we look to universities for partnerships. We look to other companies for partnerships too. And we mentioned we have a partnership with Hortifrut and publicly, we've talked about blueberries with Hortifrut and Hortifrut has the world's experts in terms of growing blueberries for production. They're really fantastic. And for us to take a step towards blueberries, it makes much more sense for us to partner up with Hortifruts of the world, than to try to go it alone and try to higher end because their culture has been built around how to keep those blueberry plants happy and how to breed them for the next millennia. It's a great place to start.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Yeah. So you talked a bit about Nokia Bell Labs and as an example of the private technology partnerships that you have, and then Hortifrut as an example of your growing and kind of R&D partnerships. What other growing and R&D partnerships do you have that is public and you're talking about?
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
I could talk about a few more of them. So we have been public to talk about a partnership with Cargill, where we are looking at cocoa and what we can do with cocoa plants, both growing indoors, and also being able to simulate really how climate change is going to affect those cocoa plants that are growing out in the world and giving some insights a little early on and also working through what does it mean to start a cocoa plant from scratch in a vertical farm in order to make sure that it's got the best chance of survival and the best yield once it gets out into the field? So we're looking at it from several different aspects and Cargill and Hortifrut and Nokia Bell Labs, those are all good examples of companies that we feel see the world similarly to the way that we see.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
So these are all companies that we're making a difference through technology and through investing in R&D is part of their culture. These are all companies that are looking to see what they can do to help out their customers, their consumers for decades to come. So that's a great match for us each step of the way. Sometimes you... So we are a B Corp. So sometimes that's a shorthand way to go is to talk about other companies that are B Corps. It's a quick way to say, "All right. I think we're pretty well aligned." I mentioned one more that we've made public, and that is a project where we are growing hops with AB InBev. So again, this is partnering with the company with the scale to have a good view of what's happening for the genetics of their plants, and also a great understanding of what's important for their market.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
And I love to see people's faces when we talk about growing hops plants, because they're so different than growing a micro green, and it's another example of staying flexible and agile with our technology and making the most of it and seeing all these different ways we can help out.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
So do you... When you grow hops inside, I mean, I've seen them outside and they're... For those people who haven't seen hops grow, the first time I saw the set up, I'm like, "What the heck is that?" But you have to... It's a very long trellis that goes up to this thing that the plant goes up. Can you shorten that or can you do some internode work where there the internodes aren't as long and you get more hops for stem or is that a secret?
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
Well, I mean, I think... They're really, really tall plants. There's potentially opportunity for genetics there to be more suitable for indoor farms, but I think part of the cool thing that we do is when we start out with something, we tend to start with what other folks are using. And if you are familiar at all with that project, because of the press release, and you look at the beer that was brewed, it was brewed with cascade hops. So cascade hops are... Every hop farmer grows cascade hops. They're one of... They're very, very popular flavor hop right now. Have been for a while. They're tall plants. But a lot of what we do is try to figure out are there things that would allow us to grow that tall plant uniquely within a grow room?
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
So we have a tremendous engineering staff and they are incredibly creative. So without giving away the farm, so to speak, we've figured out how to manage some of those tall plants when they get tall. And there are aspects of that that are about that growing that's about the plant, and there are aspects of about that how do we manage the stature of the plant in the type of situation that we're dealing with? And hop was a interesting challenge for us, but we did figure that out and it was a quite a creative solution. So it's exciting that we were able to do that. On the one partnership that I'll mention that Roger didn't mention, and it's probably more related to the B Corp side of our company is our partnership with Jersey City and the World Economic Forum.
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
So this is a partnership related to community farms. So we are building community farms and putting them... We've committed... In the first year, the project put 10 community farms in schools, in city buildings within the city of Jersey City, and we just put our first one in. The farm was designed, it was tested, it was built, and the first one went out two weeks ago, and it is growing plants in a school. This is historically something that AeroFarms has done. Ed Harwood worked with schools in the Newark area. It was a big passion of his. So it's exciting that we're able to continue that legacy in a much bigger program, and I think Jersey City is just really the start of this because there's a... I mean, a lot of people are interested in how do they bring this technology on a smaller scale to... It could be many, many places.
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
It could be inside of a cafeteria at a corporation. It could be at a grocery store. There could be a lot of places that you could place these types of farms, and we're excited that the first ones out there and growing for the school kids and they're able to learn about different plants and they actually can do some small experiments on the growing system. They can look at turning on the lights and turning off the lights. They can change the amount of water that they're giving to plants. There's a lot of cool things that they can do to learn science while they're in school and also grow vegetables at the same time. So that is another cool partnership that we have that I think fits really nicely with what we're trying to do as a company and a B Corp.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
I love that. I hadn't heard of that. That's great. So what about public partnerships? What have you got going there? I know the PIP that you're involved in has gotten a lot of press. So you want to tell us about that?
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
Yeah. I'd love to talk about the PIP program. So PIP stands for precision indoor plants, and it's a consortium between both FFRA, the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research and a group of companies. So AeroFarms is happy to be part of that executive committee in this consortium, but also BASF is here, Preva, Fluence, Benson Hill and Green Venus. This brings people to the table from across the supply chain and with lots of different views in terms of where we can go forward with indoor farming and very particularly, vertical farming. The question that PIP has focused on is genetics for indoor farms. So even more particularly, we've announced that we want to focus on lettuce, strawberries and tomatoes, and work on co-optimizing genetics and environment, and that's why you have genetics companies and environment companies on the same team.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
The first one that we've started on is lettuce, and that's working out well right out of the gates. So we are using some of our technology to speed up the generation to generation the seed to seed time for the lettuce itself, and that speed breeding is certainly helpful to get many more generations per year into the system so that we can move very quickly towards having the right lettuce favorable for farming, but it's also helping develop the technology that can be used with many other plants in many other ways. So I think that it is blazing a trail for a broader use of speed breeding by taking advantage of everything vertical farming brings to the table.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Great. So you told us quite a bit about R&D and the origins of the company as it got built up, but Roger, maybe you can take us... Talk a little bit about commercialization strategies, how you thought about that, and then let's move in, after that, move into what the future looks like for AeroFarms and where guys are headed.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
Sure. I can start out and Stacy, you can jump in at any point too. So when we think about our history of commercialization, AeroFarms, we started out expecting that local was going to be everything. And that was even built into our philosophies at the start. And part of what we found was that yes, people love local produce, but the quality of our produce is really what makes people fanatical about wanting to have our baby leafy greens and microgreens. So the R&D team works on how to drive more flavor, how to drive more vitamin content into the greens that we grow today. So, as we talk about our history, starting with baby leafy greens, that was already great, but the microgreens are fantastic.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
The flavor is... It's really off the charts. It's my favorite for sure. The vitamin content's off the charts, and I think that we're seeing more and more pull for the microgreens and for very good reasons. So as we're going forward, we're expecting to see more and more of that. Let me just put it as we wouldn't be surprised if more and more pull, more and more demand is there for the microgreens. We have talked about where and how we make decisions on setting up commercial farms. I think there's a few things that we made public that talk about that. I won't go into all of that here, but I will mention that we are in the middle of setting up our next commercial farm in Daniel, Virginia. So if you've ever been to Daniel, Virginia, I encourage you to go.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
I've actually spent more time there than most people probably have. So I can imagine it's great for the community as well. That's a great place to put a farm as far as giving employment to the area and just, yeah, great pick.
Roger Buelow, AeroFarms:
So we're excited about it and the... I actually have up on my screen, well, as I'm talking to you of a live feed of the construction site and it's pretty far along. So that farm will start out for sure with baby leafy greens and microgreens. We've also have been public by saying that we're going to go to St. Louis as our farm that serves the Midwest next, and we've published some maps that suggest a few other locations in North America, in addition to how Stacy listed out this world's largest R&D farm going up in UAE that both the government in UAE and in Abu Dhabi in particular and AeroFarms, we both think that this is going to be the anchor for expansion of really high efficiency, vertical farming in the region.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Great. Anything you want to add there, Stacy?
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I'd like to expand a little bit on the microgreen aspects and some of the points that Roger touched on relative to what is so special about those. I think it's a unique category and as consumers are starting to look for new things as they shop the produce section, it definitely is a standout. It's not something that you typically see when you go to the grocery store, and we just launched this year, for new varieties of microgreens. One of them is a broccoli, which is an outstanding item and Whole Foods identified it as one of their 2022 flavor trends was AeroFarms' micro broccoli. So it's gotten some great press and we're really excited about how people are coming, looking for microgreens because it's not something... Baby leafy greens are all over the place, right? So we definitely grow those and we have great baby leafy greens, but microgreens are fabulous and I think really driving consumers to the category and to our brand, because it's something that we do that's unique.
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
Related to the flavor, if you had been following us for some time, you know that we had our greens branded Just Greens our greens branded Dream Greens, and our company was called AeroFarms. So this summer, we rolled out a new brand, which is really fabulous, if you get a chance to take a look at it. Every part of the logo, every color on those packages was selected to represent both our past and our future as a company. So it was very deliberate. So it's hard to know that unless you're really inside of our company, but know that there was a lot of thought put into it. We have the biggest product window on shelf.
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
So consumers can look at our products and see straight through that front part of the pack and see what they're buying, which is terrific, and we've got all these cool colors on the packages and they aren't just cool colors. They actually stand for something. They stand for a flavor spectrum. So each color of the package represents a flavor, the flavor in the variety that's in the package. So the colors range from blue, cool flavors to red, spicy, and zesty and all different colors in between. So when you're looking at the greens, you can see the greens, but you can also sense from the color and the information on the package, what you're going to taste when you actually buy them. So it's not just, "Here's a package of greens and you're not sure what you're going to get. I'll give it a try and see what it is," you know before you even buy it, what you're going to get, what it's going to taste like just based on the cues from the color and from the other information on the package.
Dr. Stacy Kimmel, AeroFarms:
So that's really cool. And recently, we launched a Flavorhub. So if you're really, really excited about flavor, you can go and join that group on our website and you can get giveaways and all kinds of cool stuff and learn more about flavor and our products and you can follow us on social media through that Flavorhub as well. So that's a really... A new marketing aspect that we're bringing to that branding that just launched this month. So we launched the brand with the flavor spectrum and then we've got this new Flavorhub coming right behind it to engage consumers and really educate them on flavor and produce.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
That's great. I think it's a great place to wrap up here and just really thinking about all the R&D that you guys are involved in and then how it ends up on the shelf and these new products that everybody loves and the taste is great. And please bring them to California at some point. So thank you both so much. I really appreciate your time and your enthusiasm about the company really shines through. So great culture and I will talk to you again in another time. Thank you.
Vonnie Estes, PMA:
That's it for this episode of PMA Takes on Tech. Thanks for allowing us to serve as your guide to the new world of produce and technology. Be sure to check out all our episodes at PMA.com and wherever you get your podcast. Please subscribe and I would love to get any comments or suggestions of what you might want me to take on. For now, stay safe, eat your fruits and vegetables, and we will see you next time.
