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Contain Inc Announces Finance Arrangement With Edible Beats For FarmBox Foods Container Farm
The container farm is being built and customized for Edible Beats, and will produce ingredients for all of the EB concepts, Linger, Root Down, Vital Root, El Five, and Ophelais
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July 07, 2021
Contain Inc announces a financing agreement arranged between Edible Beats Restaurant Group & a prominent lender for a FarmBox Foods container farm.
Image courtesy of FarmBox Foods
With the FarmBox Food container, we can grow hyper-local, organic, year-round produce that will be featured at all of our restaurants. We feel this is just the beginning of what we can grow”— Justin Cucci of Edible Beats Restaurant Group
RENO, NV, UNITED STATES, July 7, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Contain Inc is pleased to announce a financing agreement arranged between Edible Beats Restaurant Group and a prominent lender for a controlled-environment container farm, FarmBox Foods. Edible Beats is a locally owned Denver-based restaurant group known for its diverse menus and healthy, plant-based dishes that highlight local and seasonal ingredients. Edible Beats will be able to grow herbs, leafy greens, salad greens, and various produce organically and year-round with the container farm that will be attached to their Vital Root location.
“We have always sought opportunities to be more responsible to the sourcing, growing, and handling of the incredible ingredients that we get,” said Justin Cucci of Edible Beats Restaurant Group. “With the FarmBox Food container, we can grow hyper-local, organic, year-round produce that will be featured at all of our restaurants. We feel this is just the beginning of what we can grow, and we are eager to add the mushroom grow operation in the future”
Image courtesy of Unsplash
Edible Beats purchased the container from FarmBox Foods, a Colorado-based company that builds automated farms that grow gourmet mushrooms, leafy greens, and culinary herbs. To FarmBox, controlled-environment agriculture is the future, and this deal is one of many leading us towards a more decentralized and eco-friendly food system.
“I think we’re going to see a lot more of these types of programs going forward,” said Chris Michlewicz, Chief Public Relations Officer at FarmBox. “Restaurants are realizing that their produce is fresher and has a longer shelf life when they have a container farm on site. It’s a reliable and sustainable source of food, and it’s more eco-friendly because you no longer have to transport food in from elsewhere.”
Image courtesy of Unsplash
Likewise, Contain Inc is thrilled to support Edible Beats as it ventures into indoor ag. “We're delighted to have assisted SemiMojo and FarmBox Foods in this innovative initiative. Contain is always excited to see more fresh food made available to consumers. Customers appreciate freshness and quality produce, year round. Restaurants and container farms make this possible”, said Doug Harding, Head of Leasing & Vendor Relations at Contain Inc. “We are thrilled to have collaborated with Edible Beets and Farm Box Foods on this project. It aligns perfectly with Contain's mission of supporting the controlled environment agriculture industry in its financing needs”.
The container farm is being built and customized for Edible Beats, and will produce ingredients for all of the EB concepts, Linger, Root Down, Vital Root, El Five, and Ophelais.
About Contain Inc
Contain is out to empower the indoor ag industry of tomorrow. Our first and key mission is bringing easier and faster financing to controlled environment agriculture, but we aren't stopping there. We create platforms to move the industry forward, and most importantly, find ways to make indoor ag more accessible to farmers of all stripes.
Contact Contain:
Doug Harding, Leasing & Vendor Relations
doug@contain.ag | 760-330-1199
About Edible Beats
Edible Beats is a locally owned independent restaurant group that operates such diverse concepts as Linger, Root Down, El Five, Ophelais, and Vital Root. “Walking the walk” is important to us and the various aspects of sustainable & local food sourcing, up-cycled design, and authentic Hospitality.
About FarmBox Foods
FarmBox Foods was founded to help provide a sustainable, eco-friendly food source to places where there is a lack of access to farm-fresh produce. The company’s mission is to use container farms to decentralize the food supply chain and empower local communities.
Doug Harding
Contain Inc
doug@contain.ag
Visit us on social media:
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LinkedIn
iFarm Partners With Contain Inc., Increases Accessibility of Vertical Farms
Dedicated to securing lease financing for indoor growers, Contain Inc. works with private lenders to facilitate leases and create custom insurance solutions
On February 11th, 2021, iFarm officially became a partner with and an official vendor of Contain Inc., an indoor agriculture fintech platform operating in North America and Europe that connects indoor growers with the resources they need. Growers now have the opportunity to lease iFarm vertical farms through Contain Inc.
Dedicated to securing lease financing for indoor growers, Contain Inc. works with private lenders to facilitate leases and create custom insurance solutions. The company organises financing for all indoor farming needs, including LED, greenhouse equipment, and entire plant growth systems like vertical farms.
Why Lease Financing is Important
Building or equipping a vertical farm can require significant amounts of capital, yet indoor growers typically lack financing options when compared to their outdoor farming counterparts. 75% of indoor growers are looking for funding, and many will not receive it from traditional agriculture banks and traditional business banks as farm lending in the United States declined at an average pace of 2% throughout 2020. While it is slightly easier to seek financing options in Europe, there is still great room for improvement.
By becoming an equipment vendor, iFarm has made its vertical farms more accessible to those who are interested in vertical farming but face the obstacle of high capital investment. Through Contain Inc., indoor growers can now lease iFarm’s vertical farms and LED systems without a need for high investment. By acquiring vertical farming equipment more easily, prospective indoor farmers can also scale their operations more quickly and cost-effectively.
How It Works
If you would like to start your indoor farming journey with iFarm, but need financial support, simply sign up to Contain Inc.’s exclusive leasing platform and complete a simple application form. The application requires you to input company basics, financial essentials (i.e. what amount is needed for lease), primary equipment to be purchased, and principal financial institutions. The algorithms can match you to a pool of 28 equipment and financial lenders, ranging from small shops to some of the largest banks in the world. The minimum lease size is typically around $75,000 with no upper limit. Contain Inc. will review your application and decide whether you are eligible for financial support.
Contain Inc. also provides a “Leasing Calculator”, which is a short quiz to help growers figure out their odds of obtaining lease financing offers through Contain Inc.
Get in touch with iFarm today to discuss how to invest in or to lease vertical farming technology.
Polygreens Podcast Episode: 17 - Nicola Kerslake - Contain Inc.
Nicola Kerslake founded Contain Inc, a fintech platform for indoor agriculture, that aids indoor farmers in finding lease funding for their projects
Nicola Kerslake founded Contain Inc, a fintech platform for indoor agriculture, that aids indoor farmers in finding lease funding for their projects. They're backed by Techstars' Farm to Fork program, funded by Cargill and Ecolab.
Latest Episode
What COVID Means For Indoor Ag Lending
Contain works with a pool of lenders to help indoor farmers find lease financing for their farm builds
By Nicola Kerslake
"This year has been strange for everyone, and lenders are no different. They live in a world of rules, and stats and data. And there’s almost no way to account for a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic in that world view," says Nicola Kerslake, Founder and CEO of Contain Inc. Contain works with a pool of lenders to help indoor farmers find lease financing for their farm builds.
"Ahead of this week’s Thanksgiving holiday here in the US, we caught up with some of those lenders to talk about surviving 2020 and looking forward to 2021," Nicola adds.
Nicola Kerslake, Founder and CEO of Contain Inc.
Nicola states that indoor farmers generally find credit from three sources: banks, private lenders and government lenders. During March and April, many lenders effectively shut up shop for new loans and leases: “we saw volumes drop by 90%” said one of the private lenders that Contain works with.
Government funding
As government funding supplied by the CARES Act kicked into action, banks were preoccupied with dispersing the paycheck protection program (PPP) loans that kept many small businesses afloat for a while, leaving less time to work on private lending. At a Brookings Institute event in April, KeyBank’s CEO said that it usually completes around 50 loans per month, but this leaped to 37,000 in the first half of April alone, thanks to the PPP program.[1] Elsewhere, several online business lenders, such as Kabbage and OnDeck, stopped initiating loans altogether.
"Now that the dust has settled, private lenders are back to business, with a few tweaks. Universally, the lenders that we spoke with saw indoor agriculture as a beneficiary of the COVID-era: “everyone has to eat, so farming looks like a better option now” one told us. They’re especially interested in seeing farms that supply to supermarket- and institutional buyers," Nicola affirms.
Other beneficiaries include testing labs and home gym equipment providers, whilst restaurants, gyms and salons were of course the worst hit. Lenders remain loath to issue new loans in these sectors, and are instead focusing on helping their existing borrowers navigate through difficult times. Nicola adds, "For instance, one lender told us he had allowed affected businesses to defer a few months’ payment to the end of their leases."
There are a few tweaks
Lenders are taking the time to check on local lockdown restrictions, concerned that unpredictable mandates could swiftly curtail farms’ ability to sell produce. Some are insisting on higher deposits for loans, and on stronger overall balance sheets. This approach is especially hard on startup farms, which generally have less capital of their own to deploy than longer-standing farms.
What will 2021 bring?
"Most of the lenders we spoke with were cautiously optimistic, citing resilient business results in areas that remain open and the promise of imminent vaccine rollouts. Across the market as a whole, rates are expected to stay low for the foreseeable future. Despite this, as one lender put it: “we’re not even going to be able to start talking about ‘normal’ again until the second quarter of next year"," Nicola says.
For more information:
Contain Inc.
Nicola Kerslake, Founder and CEO
nicola@contain.ag
www.contain.ag
Publication date: Mon 30 Nov 2020
Author: Rebekka Boekhout
© VerticalFarmDaily.com
Netled’s Niko Kurumaa On The Potential of Indoor Agriculture In North America
He told Contain, “most leafy greens are grown with pesticides in California and Mexico and then are shipped thousands of miles all over North America. People are starting to see that this isn’t an ethical way to produce food.”
Nov 29, 2019
When we dialed Niko Kurumaa, sales manager at Netled, he took Contain’s call from the rooftop of a hotel in Los Angeles. When asked how his day was going, the tone of his voice was as bright and cheery as the California sun, “Well, it’s nice here so you could say that I’m doing pretty well,” he said.
But Kurumaa was pretty far away from his home-base in Finland. So, what brought him all the way from the cold of Finland to the American west coast?
He was there for one reason: the promise of indoor agriculture in North America.
Kurumaa is the sales manager at Netled, a Finnish company that sells indoor agricultural tech like LED lights for indoor growing and fully integrated vertical farms. And now he’s in the United States to lead sales at the company as it enters the North American indoor agricultural market.
“We at Netled think that there is a huge potential for our products in North America.” He continued, “We have always been a global company, but now we see that North America has the need and the market for indoor growing technology.”
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
Netled is new to the indoor agriculture market — Kurumaa has been working in the United States for around five months now and has one LED lighting project in the United States so far. Although their experience working in the United States may be limited, this is just the beginning, and they see the potential for future business.
Growing North American indoor agriculture
When Kurumaa talks about Netled’s reasoning behind entering the United States, it all comes down to the economics of indoor farming and the quality of greens grown by their indoor farms.
“Our [vertical farming] system doesn’t just grow better quality greens; it’s economically feasible when you compare it to the traditional ways of growing greens and herbs” Kurumaa explained.
But the Company has seen some challenges to entering the U.S. market, like communicating its feasibility to possible customers.
“There are times when we need to explain the process of indoor agriculture when we meet potential growers. Some people don’t even believe that this technology exists, because people know less about it.”
This makes selling their technologies a challenge, but they find ways to overcome misunderstandings.
“We have two reference farms. One in the UK to go with our customers and a larger one in Finland that has around 47,000 square feet of growing space,” he told Contain.
The company can take growers there so that they can see first hand how vertical farming works. In addition to the farms, Netled has even set up their office as an indoor farm just so that visitors can see their technology in action when they come in for meetings.
Proving the value of indoor agriculture may be a challenge, but to Kurumaa, the promises dwarf any barriers they face to entering the market.
“South California has a long drought season and forest fires are raging. We need to think about how we use land and water. Systems like ours use about 99 percent less than conventional farms,” he said.
He told Contain, “most leafy greens are grown with pesticides in California and Mexico and then are shipped thousands of miles all over North America. People are starting to see that this isn’t an ethical way to produce food.”
He paused and then said, “Now we can produce much better lettuce in urban areas right next to the consumer. There is no reason to ship lettuce the long distances.”
It just goes to show that for this company, the call for indoor agriculture isn’t just about economic feasibility. It is about providing a brighter future for the regions of the United States like the American west. As Netled expands the business to the United States, they bring an economic rational, and an ethical imperative to live more sustainably.
WRITTEN BY
Nicola Kerslake
We’re Contain Inc. We use data to improve access to capital for indoor growers, those farming in warehouses, containers & greenhouses. https://www.contain.ag/
US: Indoor Agtech Producer Providing Lease-Back Program
United Opportunities, the developer of an exclusive program that allows individuals to take ownership positions in the AgTech market, announced that manufacturing of its high-tech growing environments has commenced. The company's advanced indoor cultivation Pods are being manufactured in Southern California and will be available for delivery by end of summer.
The company is selling these high-tech growing Pods with a unique lease-back program that allows Pod owners to receive quarterly payments while United Opportunities manages the unit and handles the cultivation, sales and distribution.
Each Pod is a self-contained cultivation system, equipped with proprietary technology, patented air and water filtration systems, and specially tuned lighting.
Jack Boyle, CEO of United Opportunities, created the company because of the explosion in the AgTech sector - and specifically in the indoor farming sector.
"The AgTech industry is not only one of the fastest growing sectors in the world, but it is also creating a profound change in how and where crops are grown, distributed and sold," Boyle said. "We are at the tip of an agricultural revolution that will impact billions of lives worldwide."
United Opportunities has developed a "Pod Farm" in California where the first 1,000 units will be placed. Owners of the units will receive a guaranteed 20% yield, paid on a quarterly basis.
For more information:
United Opportunities
(800) 379-4052
Publication date: 8/10/2018