Square Roots
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Square Roots will expand across North America through new partnership
Farming incubator Square Roots is announcing a new partnership today with food distribution giant Gordon Food Service.
Square Roots has built urban farming facilities in refurbished, climate-controlled shipping containers, which it uses to grow food and train farmers in a year-long program.
Until now, it has operated out of a single location in Brooklyn, which meant you could only purchase Square Roots from select locations in New York City, and it was only working with 10 farmers in each cohort. CEO Tobias Peggs (who founded Square Roots with Kimbal Musk) said this partnership changes all that.
The idea is to open Square Roots locations in or near Gordon Food Service’s distribution centers and retail stores across North America, and then to sell the resulting produce through the food distributor’s channels.
The companies aren’t revealing how many locations they’re planning to launch, or when they’ll open, but Peggs described it as “a long-term partnership,” adding, “There is a lot of potential with this partnership. They’re coast-to-coast in Canada, with big swaths in the United States.”
Peggs suggested that by working together, Square Roots and Gordon are answering a growing demand for locally grown food “at scale, across big swaths of the country.”
Gordon Food Services CEO Rich Wolowski made a similar point in the announcement, saying, “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.”
Why work with Square Roots? Peggs said the company’s approach requires less water and space than outdoor farms, while also requiring less investment than other indoor farming technologies, thanks to its “modular approach.”
“Certainly, it’s less of a dollar number to add a farm in a shipping container than it is to build a big plant factory,” he said. “What we’re able to do is very cost effectively, just-in-time deploy that capital expense.”
While this deal will allow Square Roots to expand, Peggs said the company will continue to operate its own facilities and handle its own sales in Brooklyn, and the company could still take a similar approach “in other markets where it just makes sense to go direct.”
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Square Roots is bringing more transparency to its produce
If you’re concerned about what you eat, there’s a good chance you’ve looked at the food in the supermarket, or in your fridge, and wondered where it actually comes from. Now urban farming incubator Square Roots is introducing a new way for you to check full history of the produce that you’re about to purchase.
To do so, you just scan the QR code or type in the lot number that the company says will be included in the packaging of all its produce moving forward. Either way, you’ll be taken to to what Square Roots calls a Transparency Timeline. You can actually try this out on the QR codes included in the announcement — the timelines show where and when the produce was planted, grown and harvested, and when it was delivered to the store.
To do this, Square Roots says it’s taking advantage of its indoor growing system, which involves refurbished, climate-controlled shipping containers, as well as “software that enables us to monitor and control every aspect of the process” — that’s supposed to help the farmers who are being trained at Square Roots, but apparently it gives the company data that it can package for consumers too.
In the announcement, Kimbal Musk (who founded Square Roots with Tobias Peggs) laid out the reasoning behind the Transparency Timeline:
Consumers across the world are demanding greater transparency into where and how their food is grown — and with good reason. As mentioned above, this past Thanksgiving, another ecoli outbreak resulted in the recall of all romaine lettuce grown in the US. This was the third such outbreak in the last two years. It put millions of consumers at major risk of foodborne illnesses. The situation was compounded by opaque supply chains in the Industrial Food System, making it ridiculously difficult to accurately trace the source of guilty pathogens. To their credit, the big lettuce producers did eventually react, and agreed to start labeling their products with a mark of the state in which their products are grown. But that’s not enough. Consumers demand — and deserve — to know more.
Musk acknowledged that some companies are trying to use blockchain technology to introduce more transparency to the food supply chain, but he suggested that the results have been “underwhelming,” and that the solution is more straightforward: “What people want to know, simply, is where and how was my food grown and who grew it? With that information, they can make their own informed choices about whether to trust the food and whether to buy it.”
Square Roots produce is only sold in select New York City locations, so the rest of you probably won’t get a chance to try this out in your own supermarket anytime soon. But it sounds like Musk has expansion plans, and he said, “As we scale, we will keep building local farms in the same neighborhood as the consumers — so we can always own the supply chain end to end.”
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