December 10, 2015

By Elizabeth Penney

Over the past decade plus, interest in urban agriculture has been rising steadily. Born out of the same food security, environmental, and healthy eating concerns that shaped the local food movement, urban farming seeks to bring food sources closer to consumers. Until recently, many of these projects have been small-scale, community-based gardens or single-use rooftop farms. The meteoric success of Gotham Greens, a New York City-based greenhouse enterprise, is changing all that.

Urban agriculture is growing up.

“We’re disrupting the ag supply chain,” CEO and co-founder Viraj Puri says. “Our brand is an alternative to food shipped thousands of miles.” Puri and his partners, CFO Eric Haley and Chief Agriculture Officer Jennifer Nelkin Frymark, opened their first hydroponic facility in 2011, a 15,000 square foot greenhouse located on the roof of a former bowling alley in Brooklyn.

Puri admits some skeptics thought, “the idea was crazy,” but today that greenhouse produces over 100,000 pounds of leafy greens sold to neighborhood markets, grocery chains, and restaurants. In 2012 and 2013 they added two more New York City rooftop locations, an additional 60,000 in square footage. One greenhouse is on top of a Whole Foods store, making deliveries a matter of carting produce downstairs.

In addition to lettuce, the New York greenhouses produce tomatoes, kale, bok choy, and herbs. Output is a staggering one million pounds per year, representing over 4 million attractively labeled clamshell containers. Recyclable, of course.

Puri is right about his competition in New York stores. A review of packaged lettuce options on Fresh Direct revealed that one main competitor is a large organic farm located in California. While the competitor’s per-pound prices are lower, the products certainly aren’t same-day fresh by the time they arrive on the east coast.

Another issue Gotham addresses is the precarious situation of depending upon long-distance food to feed the 80% of Americans living in urban areas. Any disruption due to natural disasters or other causes could quickly cause a major problem. Gotham Greens has already seen the reality of this. “After Hurricane Sandy, our brand was the only produce on the shelves when stores reopened,” Puri says. “All commercial traffic into the city was shut down.”

And, in addition to the cachet of buying food grown within blocks of the grocery store, the company’s medley of technologies and growing techniques hits every foodie hot button.

Gotham Greens doesn’t use pesticides, and in a hydroponic environment, herbicides aren’t required. The greenhouses use natural light, supplemented in winter months by high-efficiency LED lighting. Power is provided by solar panels and heat by carefully regulated natural gas consumption. Sensors control everything—light, heat, water, nutrients and carbon dioxide. Water is recycled, reducing use to one-tenth of conventional agricultural practices. Productivity is 30 times that of field growing, making a one-acre greenhouse as fruitful as a 30-acre row crop farm.

“Obviously greenhouse agriculture isn’t new,” Puri notes. “But how we are doing it is new.” From the outset, the concept was designed around the “growing trend in consumers caring about the food system,” Puri says. “Including the use of natural resources.”

Now the partners have expansion plans along the East Coast and in the Midwest.

Their first venture outside of New York is a massive 75,000 square foot greenhouse located in the Pullman District on Chicago’s South Side. Billed as the “World’s Largest Rooftop Farm,” the almost two-acre facility will produce 10 million heads of greens and herbs and employ 50 workers. The rooftop they’re leasing belongs to Methods Product, makers of environmentally friendly soaps and cleaning products. The building itself is LEED platinum-certified, claimed to be that industry’s first achieving that level.

The partners have raised $30 million to date, and although Puri declined to be specific about future projects, the company definitely plans to expand. “We believe this form of ag has a huge role to play in densely populated urban areas.”

A small footprint, use of wasted space, the latest environmentally friendly greenhouse techniques and high quality output—Gotham Greens appears to have created a winning business model. According to Puri, the operation is profitable. “The commercial success we’ve had and our execution of the concept demonstrate viability.”