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CEA Food Safety Coalition Launches First-Ever Food Safety Standard For Indoor-Grown Produce
The CEA Food Safety Coalition was founded in 2019 to represent the interests of CEA leafy greens growers in developing credible and appropriate food safety standards while educating consumers and regulators alike on the value of controlled environment agriculture
The Coalition, founded by industry leaders in greenhouse and indoor farming, developed the food safety addendum to address the unique attributes of CEA-grown leafy greens
WASHINGTON, DC, April 28, 2021 -- The CEA Food Safety Coalition, comprised of leaders in the controlled environment agriculture industry, today announced the first-ever food safety certification program specifically for CEA-grown leafy greens. Effective immediately, members of the Coalition can choose to be assessed for the CEA Leafy Greens Module, and upon successful completion will be allowed to use the CEA food-safe seal on certified product packaging. The Leafy Greens Module is measured against science-based criteria and is an add-on to existing compliance with an underlying Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) recognized food safety standard. To learn more about the certification and auditing process, click here.
Traditional food safety risk profiles include examining the physical hazards and microbial hazards from water use, herbicide, and pesticide use, and impact from animals and animal byproducts, many elements that do not impact CEA growers in the same way, if at all. The CEA Leafy Greens Module enables CEA growers to distinguish produce grown indoors while ensuring the highest standard of quality and compliance is achieved.
“Current food safety standards were written for the field, and many do not address the unique attributes of controlled, indoor environments,” said Marni Karlin, executive director of the Coalition. “This new certification process and the accompanying on-pack seal helps to unify CEA growers while also differentiating them from traditional field agriculture. It also better informs consumers and provides a quick-glance image to know when produce has been grown safely indoors, with a high standard of quality and without some of the hazards of the field, such as potential contamination from animal byproducts.”
Controlled environment agriculture takes a technology-based approach to produce optimal growing conditions inside controlled environments such as greenhouses and indoor vertical farms. Plants are typically grown year-round using hydroponic, aeroponic or aquaponic methods, without the need for pesticides and unaffected by climate or weather.
The certification program is available to all CEA FSC members for a nominal cost and must be completed on an annual basis. CEA growers can be assessed for multiple sites across four key areas:
Hazard analysis: use of water, nutrients, growing media, seeds, inputs, site control and other relevant factors
Water: all contact with the plant and with food contact surfaces. The use of recirculating water will require a continuing hazard analysis. Will also require zone-based environmental monitoring based on company-specific risk assessment.
Site control / Infrastructure / System Design: all food contact surfaces and adjacent food contact surfaces, including plant containers. Will also assess associated farm physical hazards, including lighting, robotics, sensors, equipment and utensils, etc.
Pesticide Use / Testing: the use of pesticides or herbicides during the plant life cycle.
“The CEA industry is rapidly expanding and predicted to support more than 10% of US vegetable and herb production by 2025,” said Rebecca Anderson, technical key account manager for GLOBALG.A.P. North America. “The CEA FSC Leafy Green Module will set a new industry standard for CEA-grown produce while driving consumer awareness of the innovations happening in indoor agriculture today.”
First conceived in 2019 to distinguish CEA-produced greens from field-grown greens that have been at the epicenter of many industry-crippling recalls, the Coalition successfully worked to educate the CDC and FDA about the limited risk of contamination for indoor produced leafy greens, ensuring CEA-produced leafy greens remained on store shelves during later lettuce recalls.
In addition to overseeing development and revisions to the CEA Leafy Greens Module and seal, the Coalition’s mission includes spearheading research development that supports the industry and championing CEA-grown produce as a critical component of safe and secure domestic food supply. Founding members include AeroFarms, Bowery Farming, BrightFarms, Little Leaf Farms, Plenty, Revol Greens, Superior Fresh, and Vertical Field.
About the CEA Food Safety Coalition
The CEA Food Safety Coalition was founded in 2019 to represent the interests of CEA leafy greens growers in developing credible and appropriate food safety standards while educating consumers and regulators alike on the value of controlled environment agriculture. The CEA Food Safety Coalition is headquartered in Washington, DC, and represents companies with facilities and distribution in over 21 states.
Find more information at http://ceafoodsafety.org/.
Press contact information
Lizi Sprague
ceafoodsafety@songuepr.com
'This Is The Farming of The Future': The Rise of Hydroponic Food Labs
Needing no soil or sun, an underground farm in Liverpool challenges traditional methods
Needing no soil or sun, an underground farm in Liverpool challenges traditional methods
Farm Urban’s operations director, Jayne Goss, carries a strip of hydroponically grown lettuce.
Photograph: Joel Goodman/The Guardian
Nazia Parveen North of England correspondent @NParveenGT
26 Dec 2019
Beautifully arranged rows of bok choi, parsley, tarragon and basil alongside dozens of variety of lettuce grow together in harmony under the pink glow of an LED light in a former sugar factory.
Water infused with nutrients trickles on to the green towers, keeping the rosettes hydrated and fed. This is a technically advanced indoor vertical farm buried deep in a basement at a former Tate & Lyle warehouse and now the Liverpool Life Sciences UTC.
Two academics pooled their resources, recruited Ph.D. and master’s students and are growing food hydroponically in towers – an increasingly popular concept where salads and leafy greens are grown all year round under precise conditions in vertically stacked foam-filled beds without natural sunlight and soil.
The farm is the creation of Jens Thomas and Paul Myers, both with scientific backgrounds, who first met at a conference and then again at a Thai boxing class before deciding to work together. They founded Farm Urban in 2014.
Since then, they have installed systems across the city including at the University of Liverpool, Alder Hey children’s hospital and Ness Botanic Gardens and have carried out a range of public outreach activities.
Jayne Goss, left, technical director, Jens Thomas, and managing director, Paul Myers, in a skate park next to Liverpool Life Sciences UTC. Photograph: Joel Goodman/The Guardian
Their aim is to change our relationship with food: the traditional methods of agriculture, they say, and using acres of land is no longer sustainable. The world’s population is growing – the World Health Organization estimates it will have increased to 9.7 billion people by 2050, with 70% of people living in urban areas
To preserve natural habitats and improve worldwide food security there needs to be a complete overhaul of food production methods, say Thomas and Myers.
They are in precarious territory. Similar schemes have failed, including one in Greater Manchester. The Biospheric Foundation, based in a mill by the banks of the River Irwell in Salford, was supposed to be a state-of-the-art urban aquaponic farm, where fish waste provided the food source for growing plants, and the plants provided a natural filter for the water. Three years after the project opened, it went under more than £100,000 in debt, with the reputation of the whole scheme in tatters.
Can we ditch intensive farming - and still feed the world?
Such food production schemes face very real financial challenges. First, there are the costs that, if not carefully managed, could end up being astronomical. They are mainly associated with the energy use required to maintain a controlled environment and provide artificial light. There is the issue of the carbon footprint of using high amounts of energy amid efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There has also been criticism of the farms for being geared to producing only leafy greens and not higher-calorie crops.
Thomas and Myers insist their project is different. Their aims are hyperlocal – they want to start small and gear production in tandem with increasing commercial interest in their products. Their current vertical farm, which was shipped over from Canada, has been paid for by First Ark, a Knowsley-based social investment organization. The £150,000 funding is part-loan and part-grant.
Thomas and Myers are hoping to recoup some of the cash by selling salad boxes for £12.50 to individuals and businesses, with annual subscriptions costing £600. They have also launched a crowdfunding campaign, Greens for Good, where every box of greens bought by a local business supports a box of greens going to a local school. They have raised more than £17,000 of their £25,000 goal.
Jens Thomas stands between the rows of optimised LED lighting and vertical strips of vegetables growing on moveable racks. Photograph: Joel Goodman/The Guardian
Myers, 32, the son of a hairdresser and entrepreneur, became interested in food production while working on his Ph.D. at the National Cancer Institute. Billions are spent on drug research, but he feels there needs to be a more holistic approach to look at how diet and food quality can affect health.
“This is the farming of the future. Pesticide-free and moving from the traditional horse and tractor agriculture that is steadily destroying the planet to a more sustainable approach,” he says.
Myers is fully aware of the risks of his chosen career path. “Yes, I am a bit scared – we have taken on a huge debt – but we de-risked it as much as humanly possible and now it’s just a case of carrying on and working to make it work.
”He certainly has the backing of students Emmanuella Aul-Mku and Rhianna Ghalleb, both 14, who have seen firsthand the benefits of growing salad in vertical farms. Their school canteen upstairs serves salad from the farm and pupils are regularly invited into the basement to see the mechanics of the technologically advanced food production.
Ghalleb, who spent some of her childhood in Tunisia, and Aul-Mku in Nigeria, both come from families which grew their own vegetables and fruit in their back gardens.
“My nanna had olive trees and figs and I would do gardening with her all the time and help her grow things but we don’t do that here. We just go to Asda and buy our food in plastic packets – we don’t know what conditions it has been grown in – what has been used to help it grow,” says Ghalleb.
Aul-Mku agrees this reliance on supermarkets affects people’s relationship with food and thinks these new vertical farms could change that.
“We get to see it growing in front of us and that really makes a difference. If there were farms like this everywhere then people would be able to feel part of a community because they would all be growing food for each other,” she says.
US (MA): MIT Halts Work On The Controversial Open Agriculture Initiative Food Project
MIT has closed down much of its Open Agriculture Initiative following allegations of academic dishonesty and improper dumping of wastewater, according to an article published in the NY Times
MIT has closed down much of its Open Agriculture Initiative following allegations of academic dishonesty and improper dumping of wastewater, according to an article published in the NY Times. Late last week, MIT’s vice president of research, Maria Zuber, closed down all offsite work on the project, though she has allowed researchers to continue doing some design and document work.
The project, often simply referred to as “OpenAg,” is known for its food computers — small, high-tech containers meant to grow plants in controlled environments and without any soil. OpenAg also operated larger farms it called “food servers” in shipping containers housed outside the MIT campus in Middleton, Massachusetts.
Project leader Caleb Harper also had a vision that owners of these food computers would be able to share data on the perfect combinations of light, water, nutrient, and temperature levels with one another, creating a kind of open-source framework for high-tech indoor farming. “As an open-source project, we believe the more Food Computers we all build, the more data we all have to play with, and the more we can radically alter the future of food,” states a page on the Open Ag site.
Read the full article at The Spoon (Jennifer Marston)
Start-Up of The Day: Food Made From Air
At Solar Foods, we have developed a carbon neutral and climate-independent way to produce a fully natural protein source without wasting land or water. We call it Solein. Cost-effective and suitable for all consumer diets, we can offer a full-range Solein solution with unlimited scalability for all food products and types. With a pilot already underway, we have a solid roadmap for a global commercial launch in 2021
Posted by Giacinto Bottone | Jul 25, 2019 | Tags: Solar Foods, Start-up of the day
About Solar Foods
A world in which we won’t have to use land or water in order to produce food is closer thanks to the work of Solar Foods. The Finnish start-up aims to make food without the use of agriculture. They have created Solein, a revolutionary natural single-cell protein resulting from an all- natural fermentation process involving C02, water, and electricity. The end product looks and tastes like wheat flour and it contains 50% protein, 5-10% fat and 20-25% carbohydrate.
Another great advantage of the Solar Foods’ product is that it will not run out. It is not affected by weather, irrigation or soil. Consequently, it is possible to imagine that as the supply of this environmentally-friendly protein is increased, the world’s food carbon footprint will go down.
Solar Foods’ Solein’s original concept originated from a NASA space program and it was developed by the Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd and the Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT). As of 2018, Solar Foods is participating in the ESA Business Incubation Centre in Finland.
Innovation Origins had a short interview with Dr. Pasi Vainikka, CEO and Co-Founder of Solar Foods
®Solar Foods
What was the motivation behind the creation of Solar Foods?
About one-quarter of greenhouse gas emissions which are caused by human action is due to what we eat. We need major changes there in order to become sustainable on this planet.
What makes Solar Foods stand out from the pack?
We are not connected to agriculture and are still able to produce the world’s most environmentally friendly protein. A disconnect from agriculture provides interesting opportunities for scaling. Aside from that, we are able to play a part in many future foods instead of just one category.
Do you think that there are many start-ups tackling the same issue?
No. Those that exist are aiming at fodder, not food.
What has been the biggest obstacle that you have had to overcome during the whole Solar Foods process?
There have been so many critical moments along the way, I cannot name one. Maybe the biggest hurdle was having to deal with all of them.
Was there a moment in where you thought of giving up?
Solar Foods’ Reactor. ®Solar Foods
No.
What has been the most gratifying moment in the whole process?
The moment we saw the real product/protein for the first time.
What can we expect from the coming years?
We are aiming to introduce it to the market in 2021. Which will mark the beginning of a global shift towards scaling.
What is your ultimate goal?
We would like to produce food in a very environmentally friendly way so that the planet is able to cope with it. We want to present a totally new, natural food which is viable and scalable. “Science is like magic but it is real.”
WAY OF THE FUTURE.
At Solar Foods, we have developed a carbon neutral and climate-independent way to produce a fully natural protein source without wasting land or water. We call it Solein. Cost-effective and suitable for all consumer diets, we can offer a full-range Solein solution with unlimited scalability for all food products and types. With a pilot already underway, we have a solid roadmap for a global commercial launch in 2021.
WeWork Launches WeWork Food Labs, an Innovation Lab & Accelerator For the Future of Food
By Jennifer Marston -
March 14, 2019
Image via WeWork.
Affordable workspace is hard enough to come by in old New York when you’re an independent company on a shoestring budget. For independent food startups, it’s twice as difficult because it involves finding both office and kitchen space. Unless you have deep pockets and a good realtor, looking for either of makes getting your wisdom teeth removed sound fun.
To provide both and also foster young, innovative companies across the food chain, WeWork has launched WeWork Food Labs, an innovation hub for food companies that rolls physical workspace, programming, a startup accelerator, and a food industry community into one package. And, as the name suggests, it’s specifically aimed at startups across multiple areas of the food industry, from food robotics and AI to alternative proteins, new ingredients like CBD, kitchen appliances, and logistics — all areas WeWork suggests are areas ripe for disruption.
According to materials obtained by The Spoon, WeWork calls Food Labs “the first of its kind workspace and global platform dedicated to startups impacting the future of food.” The program is designed to help startups grow and at the same time tackle issues in the food industry that become more pressing each year: How do we feed a predicted 10 billion people worldwide by 2050? How do we do so while also lowering carbon emissions, cutting back the amount of land we use, and teaching consumers about chronic disease like diabetes and obesity?
Food Labs will use two different programs, or “tracks,” to work with companies looking to solve those issues (and others).
The first track is what WeWork refers to as its “continuous programming.” Pretty much any startup in the food industry is welcome to apply. WeWork will choose between 40 and 60 companies from the pool of applicants. Those companies then get get access to the WeWork Food Labs facility, which will be housed on the eighth and ninth floors of the WeWork offices at 511 W 25th St. in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.
The space will look and function much like a regular WeWork space, with both open and private desk areas, conference rooms, phone booths, and other WeWork office fixtures. In addition, Food Labs will also house an R&D kitchen, a photo studio, showcase space for CPGs, a mock merchandising area, and a tasting table. The rooftop will hold space for urban agriculture along with other green spaces. Startups working out of Food Labs will also have the chance to use the space for events.
While space is the biggest benefit here, it should also be noted that participating companies will, by joining Food Labs, get access to The We Company’s 400,000-strong body of members, all of whom are potential new customers. WeWork noted that “Food Labs can create massive impact by powering sustainable, accessible, nutritious and delicious food solutions for The We Company’s global community.”
Those companies selected to be part of the track are encouraged to hang on to their membership for at least one year. Given the lack of space in New York City for food businesses, I doubt that will be an issue.
You can see a few renderings of the forthcoming space at the end of this post.
Food Labs’ second track is more of a traditional startup accelerator format: a shorter-term program that helps startups move from one specific stage of growth to another. As is the case with most accelerators, selection criteria is more rigid here, and WeWork will select between six and eight companies to participate in each cohort. Selected participants take part in a five-month program and get opportunities for grants, equity investment, and follow-on funding. They can also use the WeWork Food Labs space sans membership fee.
For the accelerator, WeWork has allocated $1 million to be shared across the selected companies.
WeWork getting into the food innovation game isn’t completely surprising news. The company has long been a champion of cutting edge startups, and the food and beverage industry is teeming with them right now. As well, WeWork has tried to be at the forefront of certain movements in the food industry, most notably by cutting meat from its menu and meal-reimbursement policy in July of 2018, citing environmental concerns as the chief reason for the move. And the company invested in foodtech earlier this year by backing (an undisclosed sum) surfer Laird Hamilton’s superfood startup, Laird Superfood.
WeWork hasn’t yet chosen participants for its accelerator. According to a press release sent out today, the company is currently taking applications. Food Labs Programming kicks off in Spring 2019; the flagship space in Chelsea will open in October 2019.
According to materials sent to The Spoon, the NYC Food Labs location will be the first of several. There aren’t specifics yet, but Denver and Seattle are on the list of potentials, as are places where food insecurity is an especially an especially urgent issue to fix. For those locations, WeWork has said it will work with organizations like The World Food Programme and “propel innovation” and make food “more accessible, nutritious and sustainable.” Right now, that list of cities includes: Mumbai, India; São Paulo, Brazil; Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Barranquilla, Colombia; and Bangkok, Thailand.
Disclosure: The Spoon is a launch partner with WeWork Food Labs.
Read Mike’s Publisher’s Note here to learn more about why we’ve teamed up with WeWork and the editorial standards we’ve put in place for coverage of WeWork Labs companies moving forward.