New York-based indoor farming startup Square Roots has inked an exclusive partnership with food service provider and distributor Gordon Foods that will bring its scalable urban farming model to new markets.
Founded in Brooklyn, New York, in 2016 by Kimbal Musk – younger brother of Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk – and his business partner Tobias Peggs, Square Roots is a seed-to-sales urban farming business, growing and delivers chives, basil, sage, and mint, serving approximately 30 locations in the New York region. However, plans are in the pipeline to expand its offering to include more crops, noted Peggs.
“Today we focus on a range of herbs and greens, but we’re already developing recipes for more products, such as strawberries,” Peggs told Food Navigator.
With the goal of enhancing the connection between people and their food, Square Roots has developed “human-centered farming technology”, giving their farmers data, insights, and tools to use with their cloud-connected, modular, vertical farms built inside refurbished shipping containers.
“Customers want an assortment of fresh, locally grown food all year round. We are on a path to do that at scale with Square Roots and are excited to be the first in the industry to offer this unique solution to our customers,” said Rich Wolowski, CEO of Gordon Food Service.
What sets Square Roots apart is its Next-Gen farmer training program – a one-year course that trains people with no experience to become future urban farmers. Participants receive a entry-level salary, healthcare benefits, and are taught how to grow food in a tech-enabled system, plant science, business entrepreneurship, and community outreach.
Square Roots also offers consumers their Transparency Timeline. By scanning a QR code on its packaging, consumers can identify how and where their food was grown, and by who.
Through this strategic partnership, Square Roots will be able achieve significant scale, by building out new indoor farm campuses either on or near Gordon Food Services’ distribution centers and retail locations. In business since the late 1800s, Gordon Food Services supplies restaurants, hospitals, schools, and other facilities across North America; of which, 175 span the U.S.
It also will expand its Next-Gen Farmers Training Program. Each site will need a number of trained farmers, depending on the size of each campus. The company’s Brooklyn location, for example, has 10 farms and trains between six and 10 farmers through its Next-Gen program each year.
“This partnership means we will grow delicious, local, real food at huge scale,” said Tobias Peggs, co-founder and CEO of Square Roots. “We’re so happy to be working with a mission-aligned partner in Gordon Food Service – leveraging technology to bring real food to a huge number of people across the country, while delivering real social impact by empowering thousands of young people to become our country’s future farmers.”
~ Lynda Kiernan