Small Is Beautiful — Farm to table in 50 steps
The promise of vertical farming is a viable farm to table food system — growing food anywhere and anytime of the year. Connecting farm and city like never before. But what would that really look like? And are there any examples of that today in Japan?
Whats on the Menu?
After 3 hours on the Shinkansen bullet train, I arrived to Nara City train station starving. Traveling to one of the oldest and most sacred cities in Japan, I didn’t expect or intend to be inspired by the future of food production already unfolding.
Dazed and on the verge of eating my own suitcase, I stumbled into a small generic Japanese Soba noodle shop. After quickly ordering, I noticed a whole section of the menu in Japanese dedicated to “indoor plant factory sourced ingredients”. A hunger fueled mirage? Possibly, I thought. But after a short conversation with the manager, I realized there was far more than I could have ever expected.
In a truly serendipitous event, I found great food sourced from a local Plant Factory — literally 50 feet across the street in the middle of downtown Nara. While the restaurant was small and fairly generic, their sourced food products are nothing short of cutting edge.
Farm to table in under 50 steps
I had the chance to connect with Mahoroba Suikoen to learn more about their system and business model sourcing to my new favorite Soba Shop in Nara.
Mahoroba Suikoen is located on the third floor of a mixed use building across the street from the train station. Walking outside, it’s hard to imagine a farm anywhere around the downtown area, let alone inside an obscure Japanese office building.
But for the past 2 years, Mahoroba Suikoen has been supplying restaurants like this one with veggies on demand — specifically Yamato Mizuna Leaf Lettuce. Instead of buying all of their products wholesale, and shipped in from around Japan and the rest of the world, the restaurant sends predicted quantities and varieties to the farm across the street for timely demand and delivery, with very little storage and harvest waste. It’s a sourcing method that flips the entire food system on its head.
But Plant Factories like Mahoroba Suikoen aren’t the only ones using this direct farm to restaurant model. Speaking with Keystone Technology CEO, Seichii Okazaki, I learned their plant factory in downtown Yokohama (called Haikara Yasai) follows a similar model.
“From our Plant Factory at Haikara Yasai, we service 6 restaurants within the downtown core. Most of their produce is delivered daily — all fresh before the lunch rush”.
While a farm to restaurant model has promise for the industry, it highlights 2 critical components of making it work for plant factories — price and logistics. Aside from freshness, keeping costs low enough to compete with wholesale retailers is one of the biggest concerns for this model.
Logistics on the other hand, seem to be an underdeveloped strength for this model. Connecting forecasting sensors at the farm to purchase inventories for restaurants opens a whole new market for on demand food delivery services like Uber Eats among others.
Two visions of a Plant Factory future
When discussing the future of food, the media often alludes to large vertical farm megastructures towering over city blocks. These large-scale farms have valid benefits to providing food for restaurants like that seen Nara cheaper and more efficiently in a single Farm to Table system.
However, while less flashy and a bit more difficult to imagine, a network of privately operated small scale indoor farms have distinct benefits in a true Farm(s) to Table movement.
Large Facilities
Big indoor sky farms like that of Plantagon which seem to be the most prevalent in the news with a number of large scale facility visionaries such as Aerofarms, Spread and Plantagon.
Some thoughts on large facilities
- Using innovative real-estate revenue sharing
- Large centers of central production and access/often wholesale
- Fairly inflexible to rapid technological adjustments
- Likely to have larger margins for risk management and R&D
- Likely to have high fixed and operational costs
- Difficult to provide consumer feedback to crop varieties
- Unless containerized, high risk of pathogen exposure to entire facility
Decentralized small farms
The second model is a bit more difficult to see in a single picture but functions as a network of decentralized small farms.
Some thoughts on small facilities
- Interconnected and producing on demand — while delivered seamlessly through the powers of modern logistics and quite possibly blockchain smart contracts.
- Small scale, between 3000/10000 Square feet
- Either highly specialized or incredibly diverse crop varieties
- Flexible to technology adjustments, rapid testing
- Flexible to consumer feedback to crop taste and variation
- High risk venture with thin margins but higher resilience with lower operating and fixed costs
While many proponents of the the industry concerned with cost and economies of scale will likely disagree, I truly believe that a decentralized network of small farms will provide the resiliency and flexibility needed for the vertical farm movement to scale. Sourcing food locally for restaurants, especially from many small farms, holds some of the greatest potential for true food disruption in our cities.
The future now?
So what would this look like in practice? Try to imagine you are a chef at a restaurant looking to source high quality produce year round.
- You browse for your ingredients from a catalog of small indoor farms operating within 5km of you — each rated and reviewed for taste, quantity, etc.
- With your seasonal menu now finalized for the fall, you order how much you need each day and what time you need the food by.
- Immediately, a network of small farms go to work growing your and many other customer speciality products
- Once ready, your products are delivered to you — seamlessly through the future equivalent of uber foods or instacart for wholesale products.
This second future is not as far off as you might think. Farms like Mahoroba Suikoen and Haikara Yasai are already starting to connect a new decentralized food paradigm, silently and seamlessly inside of Japanese cities.
