A Swedish company is building farms inside supermarkets as an environmentally friendly solution to grow fruits and vegetables.
The solution from SweGreen, already in place in Sweden and Germany, is a way to answer to water shortages, the lack of agricultural land, and dependence on global geopolitics.
Growing the greens locally will also reduce transport emissions, give a longer shelf life, and improve their taste.
This in-store farming solution uses a hydroponic method, where plants are grown in rockwool plugs in water without soil.
Each cultivation platform can grow the equivalent amount of food of up to three hectares of agricultural land.
Customers can see the greens grow and be harvested in front of their eyes to then pick them up from the shelf.
"Supermarkets have bakeries, for example. But now they're growing food instead of baking," says the chief innovation officer and head of SweGreen X, Sepehr Mousavi.
Currently, SweGreen can grow up to 100 different species of crops, which include lettuce, dill, mint and parsley.
"We are adding to our portfolio microgreens, testing fruit-bearing plants, and we are looking at strawberries," Sepehr adds.
How does AI help SweGreen's vertical farms?
Some consumer trends are easy to spot. "During summer festivals, the only thing you sell in Sweden is dill. And then in the midsummer festival, it will be mint, for example," says Sepehr.
However, plant growth times, seasonality and consumer preferences pose challenges, so the company has turned to artificial intelligence to help in the decision-making process.
"This is one of the use cases of artificial intelligence in agriculture," says Sepehr.
"We have an AI tool that gives the recipe of growth to our growers so that the people who work in the supermarket get a to-do list that secures them with exactly those products needed on that day."
Depending on the size of the supermarket and its needs, SweGreen's clients can also choose between a 45-metres-squared crop that has the capacity of 300 crops per day and a smaller crop that can go up to 12-metres-squared and grow a maximum of 116 crops per day.
Moving the farm to different landscapes
Supermarkets are not the only ones who are locally looking for an environmentally friendly solution - restaurants, hotels universities, and property owners also want to join the game.
Fotografiska Stockholm, a contemporary museum of photography, art and culture, has adopted this solution for fine dining at its restaurant to keep the menu seasonal and sustainable.
"Together with these guys and their star chefs, we looked into what kind of plants they could have for garnishing, for topping up, for nutrition, for kick-off taste, for cocktails, for topping things up," says Sepehr. "We also looked for practical food that is nutritional, has taste, but could be used as a centrepiece of the plates, for example."
SweGreen has been awarded and nominated several times for its sustainable food production.
In 2023, the company won the IKANO Sustainability Award and was nominated for the third year in a row to the FoodTech 500, a global list that highlights the most influential startups and scale-ups in the world for the future of food, technology and sustainability.
Euronews