Major UK Supermarket Marks & Spencer Will Launch Infarm Vertical Farms In Six More London Stores
October 18, 2019
Infarm display of herbs at Marks & Spencer's Clapham Junction store in London | STEVE AGER
Elizabeth Rushe Contributor
I write about sustainability and food innovation in the EU.
“We believe that by offering produce grown and harvested in the heart of city, that's how we want to practise this form of agriculture - resilient and sustainable and beneficial for the planet, while meeting the needs and desires of city dwellers like Londoners,” Co-founder of vertical farming start-up Infarm, Osnat Michaeli, told me yesterday on the phone from London, speaking about Infarm’s new partnership with UK supermarket Marks & Spencer.
Marks & Spencer is a much-loved retailer in the UK, which was established 134 years ago and is known for high-quality clothing, homewares, and food products. Infarm’s hydroponic vertical farms will be launched in six more Marks & Spencer stores in central London by the end of the year, following the initial launch at the 105-year-old Clapham Junction location in early September, which has been reopened as a food hall.
For the last few weeks, M&S shoppers have been able to purchase fresh herbs like Italian, Greek, or Bordeaux Basil, Mint, Curly Parsley and Mountain Coriander. The herbs are sold with their roots attached to maintain freshness. Infarm chose London for this rollout because it represents many of the sustainability challenges that people will experience in cities over the next decade, Michaeli told Forbes.
Each of the individual hydroponic farms are cloud-connected and remotely controlled by the Infarm central farming platform, "Our farmer in the cloud," Michaeli explained. Twice a week, “infarmers” visit the farms in-store to harvest and pack the mature plants, and place new seedlings in the system.
Infarm is a Berlin-based vertical farming start-up founded in 2013, which raised $100 million in Series B funding earlier this year. With over five hundred of their hydroponic vertical farms in supermarkets (like Metro in Germany) and distribution centres around the world, which grow 200,000 plants each month, the huge number of plants and cloud-controlled system gives Infarm a vast amount of data to work with. “We improve our growing recipes on a week to week basis,” Michaeli said.
According to Infarm’s website, their vertical farms use 95% less water than soil-based farming, take up only 0.5% of the space, use zero chemical pesticides, need 90% less transportation and 75% less fertiliser.
This partnership with M&S is a model of Infarm’s goal to disrupt the supply chain, by getting rid of it. “We're redefining the entire food supply chain from start to finish,” Michaeli told me, “Instead of building huge scale farms outside of the city and then distributing produce, our approach is to distribute the farms themselves throughout the city, bringing the nutritional produce to consumers right at the point of sale.”
Other retailers in the UK are also committing resources to vertical farming. Ocado, the online supermarket, announced earlier this year that they are investing £17M in vertical farming, and the high-end department store John Lewis also shared plans to grow salads in their supermarkets with the help of LettUs Grow.
Infarm also hopes to work closely with farmers across the UK as they grow their presence there. “I believe that local producers and farmers are now and will continue to be vital to food supply needs in communities everywhere,” Michaeli says, “I hope that we can all work together to tackle some of these problems.”
I’m a freelance writer from Ireland, based in Berlin. I’m interested in the future of food and how we’re going to feed the world in the decades ahead. To learn about what exactly is going on in the soil, I spent a year training in organic horticulture in 2014, growing the likes of pumpkins, tomatoes -- and of course potatoes -- in the wilds of the northwest of Ireland. This year of training made a huge impact on me and within a few months, I changed my diet to plant-based. My background includes working for startups in Berlin and my writing on food innovation and sustainability has been published by Vice, Pacific Stand and Paste Magazine.