When you approach GrowUp’s urban farm, tucked away in a no-frills industrial estate on the outskirts of London, it doesn’t exactly look like the future of farming. From the outside, the warehouse space near City Airport is small and unassuming – but step inside and the genius behind the high-tech growing operation is indisputable.
The vertical farm, which grows micro greens, herbs and specialty salad products for high-end London restaurants and trendy cafés, is sustainable and environmentally friendly in almost every way imaginable. It uses fish faeces to nourish its plants, and recycled carpets in which to grow its crops. Significantly, it is also the only commercial indoor farm in the country using aquaponics – a recirculation system that combines hydroponics (growing plants in water without soil) and aquaculture (fish farming) to create an efficient closed-loop system.
Set up in 2013 by Tom Webster, a 29-year-old former sustainability consultant, and Kate Hofman, an ex-management consultant at IBM, the project’s aim was to take aquaponics – already used in the UK on a very small scale – and commercialise it. “Kate and I were both on a similar journey,” Webster says. “We’d been around sustainability; we didn’t want to do energy and water; and we didn’t want to make excuses for businesses that weren’t taking their environmental commitments seriously. Nobody was really talking about sustainability in food a few years ago – it was all about energy and water – so I started looking at how I could move that forward and I ended up here.”
The way it works at the pair’s east London farm is neat and resourceful in the extreme. Staff drop feed into blue tanks of tilapia; the fish poo; nutrient rich waste-water from the fish tanks is pumped to the roots of the plants; microbacteria convert the waste nutrients into helpful nutrients; and the nutrients fertilise the plants, which, in turn, purify the water. The water is then pumped back into the fish tanks and the fish, once mature, are stunned and sent to a Thai restaurant chain in London to be eaten. “One of the biggest benefits of what we’re doing is that we use zero fresh water in our growing,” says Watson. “And because we grow indoors we use no pesticides whatsoever.”
Indoor production, using carefully adjusted LED lighting and a controlled air temperature, also allows GrowUp to produce leaves that look, taste and weigh the same all year round. And this ability to grow 12 months a year allows the company to offer permanent jobs to its staff, several of whom were recruited from east London employment charities. “Our workers all have full-time contracts and are on the London living wage,” Webster explains. “It’s much better than using a seasonal workforce”.
Only one person has left the team of 12 since the business was launched in 2013, and everyone who works there is a UK resident. This gives Webster a level of security enjoyed by few in the industry as David Davis and his negotiating team try to hammer out a Brexit deal with the EU.
On the growing side, the fact that the farm’s hydroponics system irrigates crops from below, delivering nutrients direct to the plant’s roots, allows the plants to grow faster. But precise control is required to ensure product consistency, Webster stresses. “Micros are extremely delicate crops and because they are so young they are very sensitive to being grown for too long or too short,” he says. “An extra day can make a big difference to the crop’s growth, texture and taste.”
Compared to fully-fledged produce, micro greens tend to have a more powerful flavour and higher per-gram nutrient levels, but the category remains niche, with the young leaves appearing mainly as a garnish – but sometimes incorporated – in high-end restaurant dishes. “I’d love to say that we’re growing our micro produce for its health benefits,” Webster says, “but what really drives our business is high-end restaurants wanting to improve the aesthetics and flavour of their food with little flecks of colour.”
Encouragingly, micro greens have become more widely used since their popularity boomed five years ago, with more cafés – as well as restaurants – now using the fledgling leaves. Both Sainsbury’s and M&S have included micro coriander in prepacked salads, and whole packs of micro greens are now available at Whole Foods Market and speciality delis. “When the popularity of micro greens boomed, people saw a massive market opportunity,” Webster says. But product prices have remained stable, with 30g packs continuing to sell at around £3.50 each.
Despite its widening appeal, Webster does not see micro greens as the future – either for his business or the vertical farming sector. The big challenge is to move beyond niche produce and into mainstream salad production, he insists. “If we’re talking about doing vertical farming for the right reasons – growing produce for the mass market and replacing imported produce – then we need to be at scale,” he says. “This is going to take time.”
In the next few years GrowUp plans to increase the size of its operation by ten to 15 times and begin supplying supermarkets with mainstream salad products. “We’ve had interest from most of the big supermarkets,” Webster says, with supply chain resilience the main benefit of indoor growing from a retail point of view. “Having to import iceberg lettuce from the US to fulfil demand is not what anyone wants to do,” he says. The former environmental consultant insists that indoor farming is “hands down” the best way to grow leafy salads and herbs and he expects vertical farms to become “really commonplace” in Britain in the next 10 to 15 years. But this expansion must stretch beyond the M25 to prove a meaningful benefit to the environment and the supply chain.
“I really don’t want this to just be a London-centric business,” Webster says. “It has to be food that everyone can consume otherwise there’s no real value in it.”
Show me what you've got
GrowUp produces five different micro greens – rocket, fennel, coriander, radish and mustard – as well as three salad leaves – sunflower shoots, pea shoots and baby watercress. The micro greens, which are grown with exactly the same seeds used to cultivate full-sized produce, are sold in 30g packs. The salads, meanwhile, are sold both separately and in 100g salad mixes. GrowUp is also trialling several new micro greens and salad products for future production.
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