Little Leaf Farms Keeps Growing And Growing

Little Leaf Farms Keeps Growing And Growing

July 8, 2018

By Paula J. Owen  Correspondent

SHIRLEY — Little Leaf Farms is disrupting the lettuce industry and giving people in New England a high-quality product that is cut and delivered within 24 hours, taking a piece of the business away from the giant California lettuce conglomerates.

The business completed an expansion last month that doubled the size of its hydroponic greenhouses, going from 2.5 acres of totally controlled indoor automated, hands-free systems, free of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, grown year-round, to 5 acres of greenhouse space.

The state-of-the-art operation at Little Leaf Farms, which opened in 2015, is on 12 acres in Devens and Shirley. The company specializes in local, fresh lettuces and salad greens, and is home to one of the most modern, technologically-advanced greenhouses in the world, with technology ranging from UV lights that disinfect water used to water plants, to soil-less trays that replace traditional soil.

The greenhouse technology at Little Leaf was developed in the Netherlands and the growing system in Finland, according to Paul C. Sellew, owner and CEO, who said Little Leaf just bought another 12 acres a few weeks ago, and plans to double its greenhouse capacity again next year. Little Leaf also hired a third grower.

“It is really a consumer-led expansion,” Mr. Sellew said. “People are buying and loving our product, and we were not supplying market level to meet demands.”

Still a small supplier compared to California, which dominates the industry and provides more than 90 percent of the region’s lettuces, Little Leaf is showing it can deliver a superior product year-round that doesn’t take weeks to transport to New England, making the product on the shelf fresher than what is grown on the West Coast.

“Prior to us, 100 percent of lettuce came from California and Arizona,” Mr. Sellew said. “We’re up against these billion-dollar California lettuce conglomerates. We’re a small local producer, and we had to win the battle in the marketplace by demonstrating we could deliver a superior product to California’s product.”

The only year-round lettuce supplier in Massachusetts, Mr. Sellew said the expansion costing “in the millions” was also an investment in the development of the local food movement still in its infancy.

“One crop we’re looking at seriously is romaine,” he said. “With the recent romaine scare from California and Arizona field producers, people have asked us to grow romaine that is safer to eat.

“A field with people and animals is not a controlled environment, and you don’t know what is running from the field. A greenhouse is a completely controlled environment. There is no way disease can enter the system, and you can have a safe product year-round. California growers can’t make that same claim. ”

Another distinction of Little Leaf is that it captures water from the roofs of the greenhouses and stores it in a lined pool and disinfects it for irrigation.

“In Massachusetts, we have water, and the West Coast doesn’t,” Mr. Sellew said. “They are pumping it out of the ground and putting it in a lettuce leaf and transporting it across the country. In a sense, you’re drinking California water in the form of a lettuce leaf, and it doesn’t make sense. It makes sense to grow it where you have 47 of inches of rain a year. California has less than 5 inches. Pumping out groundwater is completely unsustainable.”

Nikita D. Geovanis, order fulfillment manager at Little Leaf, said the business produces 8,000 pounds of lettuce a day in summer and about 7,000 in the winter.

“This is the most technologically advanced greenhouse in the world,” Mr. Geovanis said. “We’re here disrupting the industry and taking a market share share.”

Timothy K. Cunniff, co-founder and executive vice president of sales and marketing, said the first hurdle was getting a space on the retail shelf, “which is valuable real estate.”

“They cut us into the set, and we were getting noticed and repeat purchases,” Mr. Cunniff said. “Consumers know us and are actively talking about us. It’s been crazy.”

Little Leaf is also growing in the food service sector, he said, with their lettuce in area colleges, hospitals and restaurants.

“It wasn’t our primary focus, but we’re trying to feed as many people as we can,” he said. “The majority of our food comes through the grocery store. We’re in over 1,000 grocery stores. It has been an emotional roller coaster, without a doubt — the first year — and now it’s like, we got a tiger by the tail. We’re not just targeting the intellectual elite who want to support the local food movement. We’re targeting everyone.”

Andy W. Kendall, executive director of the Henry P. Kendall Foundation, said the aim is to try to grow locally as much of the food consumed in New England as possible to make New England more resilient.

“Most of the food that comes to New England travels thousands of miles,” Mr. Kendall said. “We’re at the end of a long supply chain that originates in California, the West and other places around the world.”

In Boston alone, he said the market for lettuce is about $100 million, and 99 percent comes from California and out West.

“It is not rare that you will see it already going bad and literally have to rush to eat it,” he said. “It’s not a great experience. With Little Leaf, it may be 12 hours before it appears on the shelf from when it was actually growing. It looks better and tastes better, and the consumer gets the benefit of having it in their fridge for the three weeks it would take to get here from California.”