Andrew Littler, our CEO, speaks with UK Investor Magazine, on what’s next for vertical farming  

Q & A with our CEO 

Towards the end of last year, we completed a successful fundraising Seedrs campaign to provide the capital to deliver on a £30m business pipeline by hiring key staff, boosting technology capabilities, and driving marketing – the results exceeded our wildest expectations.

Andrew Littler, our CEO joined UK Investor Magazine for a podcast to discuss the future of vertical farming; we thought we would share.

What does the UK indoor farming market look like currently? 

Well currently, the UK is facing significant demand to secure local food supply. This means that indoor growing is becoming a trend, which we’ve seen picking up pace in the last year. Throughout the COVID period, we had inquiries to illuminate UK farms going from small to large. 

And the best way of lighting indoor farms efficiently and effectively is by utilising LED technology. As it is now, the farming sector is a hybrid of two types. You’ve got your typical glasshouse or greenhouse, which wants to grow more, all year round and uses supplemental lighting. And then you’ve got your large indoor farms.

We see a considerable increase in the indoor salad sector – leafy greens and microgreens all, of which are grown hydroponically. It’s a huge growth market now, and we’re seeing some success in engaging with customers.

What’s the main driver for this? Is it that there is an increasing demand for salads and herbs that can be grown indoors? Or is it a case that there are some issues with the supply side of things? And the more traditional means that is forcing people to look indoors? Is this more of a demand-driven market? Or is it issues with supply?

Well, we’re not growers ourselves, so it can be pretty difficult to answer that. But from talking to our customers who are growers, it seems they are seeing an increased demand from their customers to keep things local.

In the UK, we import a lot from Europe. Food miles are a big issue. The need to reduce carbon footprints is a real challenge.

And we’re also told that supermarkets want more variety of crops to meet the growing needs of vegans and vegetarians. A third reason is to help deal with the fallout of Brexit. It’s an ideal opportunity to secure the supply chain locally.

In 2018 it was estimated that the market was worth 1.7 billion. There are estimates that this could grow to nearly 10 billion pounds by 2026. The US and Japan are leading the way. Where does the UK fit in the global picture in terms of its progression? Is there a lot of growth left in this industry here in the UK?

I think the UK industry is in its infancy. If you look at the USA, a big player, you’ve got the likes of Jeff Bezos, from Amazon and SoftBank, investing over 200 million in US start-ups in just two companies. Over there, large companies such as AeroFarms are attracting substantial investments into the sector.

That has now filtered to the UK, where customers who were small start-ups just a few years ago have turned into larger growing farms and supplying to supermarkets.

In some cases, technology start-ups are gaining significant capital investment to develop these farms; again, some of the people we’ve been talking to over the last year have gone from glasshouses to a warehouse-style of indoor growing. We seem to be mirroring the Japanese trend, which happened in places like Singapore and then moved into the states, coming full circle into the UK and Europe, creating demand.

The benefits bring efficiency in water use and are done safely and pesticide-free. That is a big bonus for UK consumers.

To your knowledge, can a customer tell if a product has been grown indoors? To give readers an idea of the scale at the moment and how they can see it grow going forward, what should they be looking out for at the supermarket? 

Well, I think what you should be looking at is the label. If you walk into a supermarket today and pick lettuce off the shelf, you can generally see the country of source – where it’s come from? I think that will change over the years to come. We are still in this level of infancy where supermarkets are still importing. The cycle will change as large-scale growers beef up their production and their growing capacities.

Eventually, over the next 12 months, ‘indoor grown’ will trickle into the supermarket shelves. Surprisingly, you will see that if you pick up produce and keep an eye on the source, you will see it moving from imported from Morocco or Spain or wherever to ‘grown in the UK.’

Now, let’s focus on Vertically Urban; where does it fit in the overall supply chain, and how involved are you in the production process?

VU is a focused entry into the lighting market for vertical and glasshouse farming. We’ve seen a paradigm shift away from traditional lighting, like HID lamps, to LED.

The reason is that with LED, you’re able to focus photons of light, where they’re needed, safely. Before, we depended on lots of hectares of greenhouses, and in winter months, you’d see supplemental lighting trying to boost yields.

Vertical farms are layers of stacked growing trays or growing systems. And they grow to specific heights.

At Vertically Urban, we offer a very low-profile fitting that is only eight millimetres deep, which allows the grower to stack a lot higher – in some cases, getting a better yield per square metre.

We’re doing this by utilising the best photon-yielding LEDs available to us, combined with our proprietary extraction techniques and our control technologies.

This methodology is inspired by the NASA space station where they have grown hydroponically for years. It has now come down to Earth. The difference is that it has reached the point where the return on investment is sound.

For example, we see small farms in London taking advantage of very tight spaces, niche farms that grow locally to supply local restaurants and consumer bases, and huge farms growing around the UK providing to supermarket chains.  

We fit in by providing a turnkey solution for the growers, manufactured and designed in Britain, revolutionary in its output, and very flexible in its design and format.

Several of our clients and partners don’t want a product off the shelf because they’re looking to create the next generation. Recent lighting studies show that specific wavelengths of light produce different flavours or enhance flavours.

Farms, growers, or designers create a system that’s flexible enough to meet future demands. Through this, you may see new crops coming into the indoor growing world. Adding a level of control and future-proofness into their design allows them to switch on or turn off different products to meet trends and demands. We’re providing that level of flexibility from the outset and showing farmers how they can do that by managing the expectation of what they grow or creating levels of multi-channel lighting systems to accommodate whichever crop they want to grow in there.

How does the competitive landscape look? Who else is out there offering similar things? 

The leading players in the marketplace are big lighting companies such as GE and Signify. They all have a division for horticulture and are predominantly interested in selling volume amounts of a standard product and supplying to large-scale projects. 

But customers are looking for a solution; they don’t necessarily want what’s currently available to them. Farms are becoming more sophisticated and work with bio scientists, learning what they want from spectrum wavelengths. They now come to us with a specification and want to work with us as a technology partner. 

So, we differ; what we have is a bit like a Lego box of parts. Our standard product, and within that, we have building blocks to make different light levels or different spectrums within that form factor. In some cases, we can also deliver a completely bespoke solution.

So far, 2021 has been good to us. We have been fortunate that COVID hasn’t stopped the sector; if anything, it’s accelerated it and helped towards the boom of the indoor growing sector.

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