Site Visit — Delight Foods, Okinawa Japan

InLoCo (Internationally Local Company) was founded in 2008, offering fully operational container farms as a serviced solution. Almost everything from the lights to the aquaponics are patented and serviced by InLoCo, allowing the company to franchise their growing system in what can only be described as a vertically integrated and vertical farming system.

It’s an interesting business model to sell a solution rather than operate an actual farm. It’s also a model that many startups are also attempting in the United States. Organizations like FarmedHere, Podponics and Local Garden have already shuttered production in their attempt to craft the perfect system model. While others, like Plenty and Aerofarms, have garnered the financial interest and investment of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Goldman Sachs, respectively.

It’s a risky business to sell a system that grows certain crops well, especially given the rapid innovation churn that renders many of these systems obsolete or inefficient. What caught my interest about this company is their service model approach — offering a packaged solution, in this case fresh produce for a local supermarket vendor in one of the largest malls in Japan.

Okinawa is an island closer to Taipei than Tokyo. And even though it’s a small place, it is by no means a food desert. Aside from the seasonal monsoons, Okinawa is known for its beautiful and sunny weather and perfect for farming all year round.

Cheap fruit and veggies are hard to compete with, but Delight Foods provides the produce 10 meters away from the shelves using the InLoCo container farm system. It’s actually closer to walk to the farm than the cash register. And if that’s not fresh enough, each wrapped bag of veggies is timestamped.

Unless you look closely at the small marketing notice on the shelves, it’s hard to notice the difference between these vegetables from far away. And from a distance, it looks like these cleanly wrapped kale, bok choy and greens are flying off the shelves. But standing there a bit longer I started to notice something.

The veggies were actually being stocked to the bare minimum throughout the day. As products were selected off of the shelves, they were almost immediately replaced with freshly harvested bags from the growing system outside. With the diligent oversight of the attendant, there was less urgency to anticipate consumer demand with stocked shelves. Though a bit laborious, less quantity allows for fresher picked produce.

But nobody wants the last banana.

Jake, what are you even talking about?

There’s quite a bit of psychology that’s involved in effectively selling produce in supermarkets. At least in the United States, grocers know that in order to sell everything, they need to give the appearance of quantity and choice. The last bushel of bananas isn’t necessarily the last to go, since consumers often question if there is something wrong with the quality or appearance of the product, thus leaving it as the only option.

It’s a minor bug in the psychology of our food system — but it’s important when weighing the efficiency of production versus the efficiency of consumption.

Testing (and tasting) viability

With limited communication with the InLoCo team, it was hard to evaluate a business model like this. Financial information is often closely guarded by the operating business and the system designers, it’s a make or break business model, and pulling up the hood early, is risky.

Despite the challenges of a financial assessment, I decided to try the next best option — a taste test.

Taste is a delicate sense, but cultivating taste is truly an art. And all culinary experts can agree that the quality of your produce defines your final product. Moreover, what’s the point of a sustainably derived food future if it’s not delicious too?

So I tested the model and bought some freshly harvested Bok Choy, Salad Greens and Basil — three of the many leafy greens sold in the vegetable section. And for my control, I bought soil grown varieties of the same veggies — still local, just not grown inside.

I chose Bok choy because of its texture, Salad greens to assess bitterness and basil, because without it, pizza would go extinct. I prepped the foods exactly the same way and labelled underneath the identical bowls before having a friend rearrange them.

Granted, this was no NIH study and I am no culinary author, but bear with me here — after trying all of the samples I noticed something interesting. While it was fairly difficult to taste the differences in plant texture for all three, one feature set them apart. It was much easier to tell them apart by the smell, or more notably the lack thereof from the indoor grown varieties.

As it turns out, this isn’t an unknown side effect of the lighting, rather it is often the acidity or alkalinity of the substrate. InLoCo utilizes aquaculture to help fertilize nutrients for the plants. While it is incredibly resource efficient to use this closed loop system, it allows for a decent amount of variability — altering the smell and flavor of plants and herbs.

Scientists have known for hundreds of years that plants respond to light and PH changes in a variety of ways. Recently, results of a new University of Florida study validate how specific light wavelengths can manipulate volatile compounds that control aroma and taste in several high-value crops, including petunia, tomato, strawberry and blueberry.

Even without the use of genetic modification, botanists are starting to better understand in how changing the micro-factors of a growing environment can drastically change the way our food tastes. It’s all part of a larger equation as our understanding of lighting, nutrition and plant epigenetics progresses.

This is all to say there is still an incredibly large number of unanswered questions and potential discoveries in the way that plants grow and taste.

While InLoCo’s and Delight Foods plant factory truly bring the farm and vegetable aisle closer than ever before, it is also a valuable case study in the role of human perception and psychology in the shopping aisle — for both taste and choice.

There is still much to be learned between the growing system and the consumers check out bag. It’s a miraculous and insane balancing act between quality, price, taste and visual appeal. And businesses like Delight Foods will need the skillsets and confidence to use these systems with no risk before they arrive at a supermarket near you.