Kimbal Musk Is Reinventing Food One Shipping Container At A Time
Interesting dresser, marketing pro, rich dude, brother to the most famous man in tech: Musk is changing food production, one shipping container at a time. And it's starting to work.
By Kevin Dupzyk
Oct 24, 2018
DAVID SCOTT HOLLOWAY
The low-slung building on Evans Avenue with the greenhouse roof blends into the surroundings in an uninspiring stretch of Denver, all nondescript retail and pockets of ranch homes. It’s a hydroponic farm, run by partners Jake Olson and Lauren Brettschneider. The produce is all on tables at waist height, and the plumbing is subtle and minimalist. There is no soil anywhere. From the street it’s easy to miss Rebel Farm; inside, it looks like an Apple Store hosting a farmer’s market.
One afternoon this summer, Kimbal Musk, a tall, lanky man in a cowboy hat, ducked in through the front door. He was here to see about the produce for his Denver-area restaurants. Unlike, perhaps, the average restaurateur, he’d brought a couple of assistants, who used smartphones to photograph his entrance, and his greeting with Olson and Brettschneider, and the huge smile he put on when he surveyed the farm. He’d never been to Rebel Farm before, but the operation was already providing him gem lettuce, a trendy green, and now he wanted to see what else it might offer. Olson and Brettschneider start walking him up and down the aisles. The building’s southern exposure is a heat-exchanging wall, and they start there, in the cool-climate crops.
“We just can’t get spinach to grow,” the Rebel guys say.
“Really?” Musk asks. “What about kale?”
Arugula’s easy. “The gateway green,” they all agree.
Musk surveys the farm and talks hydroponic technology in the manner you expect his older brother, Elon Musk, might approach a tour of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Like his brother, Musk is a billionaire entrepreneur, but since 2004 he’s made his living in food.
Musk tastes hydroponically-grown greens at Rebel Farm, an urban farm in Denver, CO.
DAVID SCOTT HOLLOWAY
At each new crop, Olson and Brettschneider tear off a few leaves for Musk to try, and he takes each bouquet, contemplates it, smells it deeply, eyes closed, takes a bite, and stares off into the middle distance. For a moment it’s like he is absorbing the simple life of the leaf, just sun, soil, and water, the way cannibals eat the hearts of others to imbibe their essence.
Of course, this also makes for good photos. And Instagram Live opportunities. He asks Olson and Brettschneider to do a short live video with him, and they oblige him behind a planting of sunflower sprouts on a sheet of geometric growing foam called Horticubes. An assistant gets in position with her smartphone, and as soon as they start recording, Musk comes to life, a perfect host, asking leading questions and making sure that the brands’ audience gets to know Olson and Brettschneider and their strange urban farm of delicious hydroponic crops.
Video over, tour back on, and Musk quickly turns to logistics. “Do you know how much production you do?” he asks.
Musk has a particular interest in this farm that goes beyond his restaurant chains, The Kitchen and Next Door. Musk also cofounded an urban farming startup based in Brooklyn, called Square Roots. Square Roots develops hydroponic farms housed in shipping containers that use high-tech lighting systems and offer precise, scientific control of light and every other relevant variable, like water and nutrients. Then it teaches a new breed of farmer—think Brooklyn hipster with a back-to-the-land mentality—to use them.
“Well, this is 15,000 square feet,” says Olson.
“Right, so that’s about one third of an acre,” Musk says. “At Square Roots we’re able to take a shipping container and get two acres of productivity out of it.”
“That’s some big shipping container,” Brettschneider says, not quite getting what Musk’s driving at. Musk is speaking entrepreneur, but Olson and Brettschneider are just two people who left pretty good day jobs to work the land. (As it were.)
Sprouts on a low-water growth medium. DAVID SCOTT HOLLOWAY
Musk’s goal isn’t just to produce food, or just to produce food that’s good. It’s to produce what he calls “real food”—“food you can trust to nourish your body, trust to nourish the farm, and trust to nourish the planet”—as efficiently as possible. The way he sees it, the last few decades have seen two food movements, opposites, both misguided. There’s the precious food movement, which aims to set the table only with food grown in the immediate community. The problem with that is that it’s pretty much restricted to wealthy people in fertile places.
Then there’s the feed-the-world movement, which produces more food than we need, most of it processed, unhealthy, and untasty, leading to health problems like diabetes and obesity. Musk is trying to shoot the gap, and unlike the cornucopia of restaurateurs in most midsize or larger cities these days offering local kale, he has the background and resources to implement a grander vision. Kimbal opened The Kitchen, a fine-dining restaurant, in 2004 before conceiving of Next Door, which sources ingredients with the same principles but offers food with a tad less pretention and a bit more fun, at prices—generally under $15 an entrée—that most Americans can afford. And Musk has ancillary enterprises that lay the groundwork. He founded a nonprofit, Big Green, that installs learning gardens in schools to educate kids about real food. Then there’s Square Roots. Musk points out that with shipping-container farms, which lock out all the traditional encumbrances of farming—drought, locusts, 24-hour cycles of day and night—optimization of food is possible. Unlike a traditional farmer, who may work his land for 50 years and in that time get only 50 growing seasons to experiment with, a Square Roots farmer can iterate endlessly until: spinach.
As we’re getting ready to leave, Olson and Brettschneider ask if they can show off some of their more specialized crops, and we make our way to the hot north end of the farm. They take us to a rack covered with huge serrated leaves and tangles of thick stalks. Brettschneider pulls some of the tangle away and points at a smooth purple ball from which the stalks emanate.
“What is that?!” Musk asks.
“Kohlrabi!” Olson says, uprooting one and handing it to Musk, who holds it in one of his big hands and examines it from every side. Olson launches a disquisition on all the ways you can cook up kohlrabi, and while Brettschneider says it isn’t exactly her favorite veggie, even she’s clearly pleased to be showing off their crop. Musk smiles, pondering all the uses of this strange orb, and his assistants fire up the smartphones to catch him mugging with the vegetable.
“It’s a pretty good job I have,” Musk told me earlier that day, on the way into a shopping center in a neighborhood in South Denver. “I get to go drop off food at children’s hospitals.”
Just across the street is a branch of Children’s Hospital Colorado, and we’ll be heading there soon—just as soon as we finish at this shopping center, where we’re checking out what will soon be the newest Next Door. So far it’s a plywood husk. The whole time Musk walks around the interior, he’s being photographed. He throws on a hard hat and walks slowly from room to room, exaggerating looks of surprise. The check-in is as much photo op as inspection, part of the constant hard work of building a business.
I ask him if he ever gets tired of being photographed. “Oh, with Instagram, it’s all the time,” he says, in a way that might be wistful if one could be wistful through such a radiant smile. “Not just journalists.”
DAVID SCOTT HOLLOWAY
When every conceivable angle has been captured for social, he says—cheerfully—“Let’s go meet the neighbors!” When Musk opens a new location, he likes to scout the other businesses nearby. The shopping center is a quad, with rows of stores around each of four sides. We skip the eyelash store next door to Next Door, which isn’t open yet, and go into a clothing boutique one storefront down.
Musk asks the woman behind the counter at the boutique how long they’ve been open, and how things have been going, and which tenants are in already. You know—small talk. This is the thing about Musk: Everything he does has a purpose.
The woman mentions the parking situation, which is that there isn’t enough of it. “Yes,” Musk says. “I did notice that it seems like not quite enough spaces for the businesses here.” He looks out the glass walls of the boutique, a little troubled. We proceed to the Orangetheory Fitness on the adjacent side of the quad. Musk mentions the parking, and the young man and woman working agree that, yes, it really does seem like there are a lot of cars here. Musk peeks into the last two stores on that side of the lot and then works his way back to a Starbucks on the far corner, popping his head into more shops along the way. He eyes the full lot suspiciously as he walks, first on the way into the Starbucks, and again on the way back out, cup in hand.
When we finally climb through gull-wing doors into the backseat of a white Tesla Model X, Musk looks around for a moment before pushing a button on the back of the center console to release two cup holders.
“Have you given your input into the design of the cars?” I ask. (Musk serves on Tesla’s board of directors.)
“Oh yes, I’ve been quite involved,” he says. “Once there was a design with no consideration of cup holders. That was a terrible idea.”
In 1999 Kimbal and Elon sold Zip2, the company they cofounded, to Compaq for $307 million. Elon took his and became Tony Stark; Kimbal took his and moved to New York, where he enrolled at the French Culinary Institute. He was living blocks from the World Trade Center on 9/11—close enough that he had a security pass to get into the zone around the Twin Towers that shut down for rescue and cleanup. That’s the first of the foundational stories about Musk and food: that he used that pass and the good suggestion of a Culinary Institute colleague to spend weeks feeding firefighters at Ground Zero. He opened The Kitchen in Boulder three years later. The second foundational story about Musk and food happened in 2010. At the time, Musk was still working for tech companies in addition to working in food. He was tubing in the snow with his family when his tube flipped and he broke his neck. He was paralyzed for three days, and found himself contemplating all the big things one contemplates in such circumstances. It was time to get out of tech, he realized. Food was his passion.
As we pull out of our parking space, he asks his assistant, who’s driving, to exit the shopping center between a Shake Shack and a Torchy’s Tacos, a different way than we came in. He doesn’t know Torchy’s but he’s heard it’s popular. He gets a call as we’re leaving. “The problem with this place is going to be the parking,” he says into the phone. He bobs his head down to look at the patios of the Shake Shack and the Torchy’s, which are both full of customers, and registers approval.
Musk’s finishing up the call when we pull into the parking lot at the children’s hospital. On the way in, he shakes a few hands and takes more pictures. We wind our way back to a conference room, where Hal Reynolds, Next Door’s regional operations manager, and Brad DeFurio, development chef, are rotating in fresh trays of roasted veggie quinoa bowls, ancho chile chicken bowls, curry chicken sliders, and chips and guac and hummus for hospital staff. Musk greets Colin Ness, director of operations: Parking is going to be a problem, he tells him. Musk does more photos and a TV spot and grabs some food. I ask him what he recommends. He assures me that it’s all good.
THIS IS THE THING ABOUT MUSK: EVERYTHING HE DOES HAS A PURPOSE.
“This is really great for us,” he says, pausing to chew. I expect something about what fighters the kids are, and how pleased he is to have such an admirable neighbor. Instead: “Because we’re trying to add catering, and this is a good test.”
Musk never lost the skills he honed at Zip2 and the other tech companies he worked for. At Zip2, he was director of product marketing, and he tells me he’s still a product guy at heart. He figures out what he’s selling and how to position it. He makes himself an embodiment of the brand, which these days is about food and connection. When Kimbal Musk wants to reconnoiter a shopping center, he says, “Let’s go meet the neighbors!” When he needs a test run for catering, he finds a children’s hospital.
That night Musk works the open-air upper level at Next Door Glendale, a location in another corner of suburban Denver. Next Door hosts a school fundraiser series called 504U: On certain nights, when a school brings in business to the restaurant, they get to keep 50 percent of the profit. Tonight is the pre-school-year event to rev up the educators for another season of philanthropy. Musk goes from group to group of buzzed teachers and gorged administrators and expertly makes conversation and offers hugs.
Then Ness comes over and speaks to him semiprivately, voice a hush. Musk’s eyes grow wide with amusement, and he puts his hands over his mouth. From the looks of things, some part of tonight’s itinerary has gone wrong. Musk and Ness whisper, and then Musk shrugs, and Ness dashes off to fix it. Musk goes back to work. He greets everyone like he knows them. He’s mixing and greeting and good-humoring—even when a guest, like the fanboy wearing a ball cap emblazoned with “The Boring Company,” the name of one of the many projects of Musk’s brother, doesn’t seem so interested in the fundraising as in a real-life audience with a Musk.
Soon Reynolds comes walking slowly and carefully through the crowd, gingerly carrying a bucket and some kind of cloth-covered implement, which radiates heat. Ness follows, and he gets Musk’s attention. Musk jumps up on a chair and draws in the crowd. “We call this a branding party,” he says. “And we’re going to take an actual brand, like you’d use on an animal, and put a brand on the restaurant.”
“The catch is,” he says, “the handles burned off.”
MUSK GOES FROM GROUP TO GROUP OF BUZZED TEACHERS AND GORGED ADMINISTRATORS AND EXPERTLY MAKES CONVERSATION.
Musk hops down from the chair and walks over to the bucket. The charred remnants of the brand’s dual wooden handles have been wrapped in a few layers of towel and tied fast with string. What wouldn’t Elon give to fix a problem so easily? It’s not a bad gig Kimbal’s got, having expressed the Musk curiosity and faith in technology through a product that still has the most visceral, tangible kind of accountability—Does it taste good?—and now he’s got these restaurants and he’s teaching children to eat well and he’s pursuing his own dream of a previously unimaginable future, one in which a trendy city kid says “Welcome to my farm!” and cranks open the door of a shipping container in some gritty, hollowed-out urban district and runs his hands through hanging fields of chard.
Musk grabs the towel handles with both hands and presses the brand hard into the wood frame of a large chalkboard menu hanging on the restaurant’s wall. He splays his great long legs wide to form a base of support and pushes hard. At first, nothing seems to be happening, and Musk is straining, long arms taut. Then you start to smell it. Wood. Wood burning. Musk’s body quivers with the effort. It’s been a long day. Smoke starts to rise from the brand and the smell intensifies, that burning wood smell of chips in charcoal. Musk holds the brand in place a second longer, then pulls back. A perfect “ND” is burned into the wood. “Ha!!” he shouts. He lets loose a primal scream. He smiles a big, toothy smile. He’s made his mark.
Musk has made his mark.
DAVID SCOTT HOLLOWAY
The next morning, Kimbal invited me and David Scott Holloway, a photographer, to hike his commute: from his home in a Boulder neighborhood, up the side of Mount Sanitas, and back down to the original Kitchen and Next Door in downtown Boulder.
Looking east from just above the treetops of Kimbal’s neighborhood.
Kevin Dupzyk: So Square Roots attacks the farming problem with technology. Do you think of Square Roots as more of a technology company or a food company?Kimbal Musk: I think it’s not a meaningful distinction. In order to do anything great today, you have to be a technology company. But on the food side, you’ve got to grow something that tastes great and is super-nourishing. That people trust. If they don’t like it, they don’t like it. You can’t solve a product-quality problem by talking about the technology.
KD: You said yesterday that even when you were doing tech stuff, the marketing thing was what you were really good at. Where did that come from?
KM: I’d say product, marketing, and sales are what I was better at. I don’t know where it came from. I had a painting business in university, so that taught me a lot about sales. I don’t know. There’s this thing I learned from Steve Jobs—I didn’t know him, but I learned from reading about him—if you do what you love, success generally comes from that. And I just love product.
KD: You have chalkboards in your restaurants that list the sources of your ingredients. A lot of places do that now, but I’ve heard speculation that you were the first.
KM: I believe so, yeah. We actually designed those chalkboards for the menu. And our menu changes every day, and we didn’t quite get to the operational challenge of that—erasing a menu and writing it out every day. And so we had the idea to put our farmers on there because it would still change, but it wouldn’t change every day. And that really sort of hit a nerve.
We descend back down to the streets of Boulder, and we’re walking through a residential neighborhood just a few blocks from downtown.
KD: Because this is a food you’ve mentioned a couple times over the last two days . . . I have to confess I really don’t like tomatoes. KM:Well you’re probably eating bad tomatoes. Most tomatoes are pretty bad.
KD: That’s what the tomato people are always trying to tell me.
David Scott Holloway: Kimbal, are there any foods you don’t like?
KM: Um . . . I don’t like things that are too processed. And that’s more of, like, an aversion.
KD: Come on—there’s not one vegetable you don’t like?
KM: Let me think . . . I don’t think so, because I know how to cook pretty much any vegetable to make it taste good. But if I eat vegetables other people cook, I often don’t like them.
DSH: My family was definitely part of that convenience generation. If my mom could get it out of a can, or if it could go into a microwave, she was feeding it to me.
KM: Yeah, they idolized convenience for so long. And people still want convenience. But it got to such a point of convenience where you’re just sitting by yourself all alone in front of a TV eating a TV dinner, and that’s kind of where our life ended up.
KD: I still kind of feel like it’s a treat when I eat a TV dinner.
KM: Really?! Oh my God! That grosses me out!
KD: It’s just because when I was a kid, it was like—we’re going to watch TV while we eat, and there’s a brownie in there!
KM: Well, I admit, I don’t think I’ve ever had a TV dinner.
KD: You’ve got to try it.
KM: You eat a tomato, I’ll eat a TV dinner.
KD: I’m fascinated by this thing that Square Roots hints at, where our idea of what a farmer is really changes. Do you think the mix of factory farms and these other models is going to shift significantly by, say, 2050?
KM: I’m already seeing in Colorado a lot of family farms are coming back. These are farms that might have a top line of $500,000 in revenue. They’ll sell to restaurants, farmers’ markets, and they’ll live on the farm with a cash flow of maybe $100K after all expenses are paid. That’s a pretty good lifestyle. Not everyone wants that lifestyle, but it is a pretty good lifestyle. But if you want to live in the city, like New York, the family farm doesn’t really exist.
[Smiles broadly with a realization.] Actually—I take that back. Rebel Farm was a family farm! That was a couple, with their kids, running that farm in downtown Denver. So it can be done. It’s just, I think, a little more unusual.
Musk stops walking. We’re in the bustling center of downtown Boulder, right in front of The Kitchen and Next Door.
KM: So here’s Next Door. This is where I end up. That’s my commute.
Kimbal Musk on his commute to work. DAVID SCOTT HOLLOWAY