Inside AgTech Startup Evergreens Farms' Scalable Vertical Farms

By Emma Campbell

November 25, 2020

Sometimes, the grass is greener on the other side.

Just ask Evergreens Farms, an agribusiness that’s bringing innovation to the farming industry.  With patented vertical farming technology, the startup has invented a way to increase crop production year-round, while reducing costs, waste, and lengthy supply chains.

Unlike typical hydroponic farming, Evergreens has a unique irrigation system that allows plants to grow in dense environments, which speeds up their growth cycle. The plants are grown in stacks, either next to each other or vertically atop one another.

“We can grow 300 to 400 times the amount of product at the same square foot as compared to a field farm,” said founder and CEO Ahmad Zameli. “That's because we stack everything up and because the cycles are a lot faster than field farming.”

The company, which grows everything indoors, currently has four products: baby arugula, baby kale, an arugula-and-cress mix, and a brassica mix. The ability to grow produce indoors also allows for an increase in crop production, since the plants aren’t dependent on the seasons. Instead, the produce is grown year-round.

Zameli, who studied industrial engineering at Northeastern University, founded Evergreens in 2017. He originally planned to set the company up in the Middle East; Zameli is Lebanese and grew up in Saudi Arabia.

“My dream was to take indoor farming and bring it to the Middle East, specifically to Saudi Arabia—take it home because 90 percent, if not 100 percent, of all of our fresh food in Saudi Arabia is flown in from outside the country,” Zameli said. “The supply chain is really, really crazy. There's a lot of waste in the product, and the carbon footprint is massive.”

He initially wanted to buy indoor farming technology and grow food locally through a network of farms across the region. However, the farming technology that existed couldn’t operate at a large enough scale to turn a profit.

“If you really want to break into the larger food space, you need to be able to meet cost—cost of production to compete at wholesale, and not just in a niche distribution channel,” Zameli said. “Our mission is to create a piece of technology that's profitable to operate at a large scale and able to distribute food in wholesale markets.”

The company will now be focused on New England. Evergreens’ business model has also evolved. Rather than exclusively building and owning farms, Zameli and his team decided that to be able to scale effectively, they would need to partner with growers.

Zameli partnered with Northeastern University three years ago and has since built three farms on the school’s innovation campus in Burlington, Massachusetts. Evergreens is currently building its fourth farm off of the Burlington campus. This new farm will be the company’s first commercial, revenue-generating farm.

“Our farms are going to be gradually larger, they're all going to be in New England, and they're all going to be serving the New England region,” Zameli said. “The portfolio of crops that they're going to grow is going to change, it's going to expand over time... And the point of building those three is to kind of prove our technology and prove our marketability...Once we get to that point, we will then switch over our model and begin to franchise, where we will partner with growers and investors who are interested in operating technology like this.”

During the past three years, Evergreens Farm’s technology has reduced costs, waste and lengthy supply chains. With the company’s patented technology and unique irrigation method, the company has been able to grow plants in a production line method, thereby saving money on a key growing component—light.

“We're not lighting unused space, essentially ever,” Zameli said. “All of the light that we're giving the plants is being used by plants. It's not being absorbed by sunlight materials elsewhere.”

Evergreens also reduces two types of waste: water and food. First, the company never washes its produce, because the plants are not treated with pesticides, herbicides or fungicides. Evergreens also recaptures and reuses water, including atmospheric humidity, which reduces the farms’ water use by up to 99 percent.

For Evergreens, reducing food waste goes hand in hand with reducing lengthy supply chains. Typically, in conventional farming, when produce is transported by trucks, it can take approximately five to eight days before it reaches the grocery store. The produce changes hands as many as five times before it reaches its final destination, each time increasing the chance of introducing foodborne illnesses, degrading the flavor, and decreasing the shelf life, Zameli said.

According to Zameli, about half of all food harvested is thrown away before it reaches its final destination, a “shrink factor” that contributes immensely to food waste in agricultural supply chains.

“By being close to where the stuff is consumed, by being close to all of the grocery stores, we can deliver directly to them right after we harvest,” Zameli said. “Within hours of us putting the stuff into boxes, we ship it directly to the store, and it's on the shelf within 24 hours. Consumers can pick it up, and it's freshly harvested. It lasts two weeks longer in your fridge.”

Evergreens won the Ahold Delhaize Supply Chain Innovation Pitch Award earlier this year. It was also part of MassChallenge Boston’s 2020 cohort. The startup has raised $750,000 in pre-seed funding.

Evergreens Farms is one of BostInno’s 2020 Inno on Fire. Celebrate Evergreens and the other winners at our virtual awards ceremony on Dec. 3. Register here.

Lead photo: Zameli at work on Northeastern's Innovation Campus in Burlington, Massachusetts.

Matt Modoono/Northeastern University

Emma Campbell is a contributing writer for BostInno.