Pioneering vertical farm GrowUp Farms has added another award to its trophy cabinet after scooping the Best SME of the Year accolade at the edie Awards last week.
Now in its 17th year, the edie Awards are the UK’s largest sustainable business awards scheme and they celebrate companies that are making outstanding progress on sustainability initiatives. They are organised by business media brand edie, which delivers news and events to sustainability, energy and environmental professionals.
The edie award is the sixth award for GrowUp Farms in just over six months and follows hot on the heels of its success for its ready-to-eat, bagged salad brands, Unbeleafable and Fresh Leaf Co. which won The Grocer New Product and Packaging (Champion) 2023 and The Grocer New Product and Packaging (Silver) 2023 respectively. Unbeleafable also won Silver the Salad category in the All-Year Round categories in the Quality Food Awards.
GrowUp Farms won the Sustainability Excellence Champion (Climate) 2023 in the FPC Fresh Awards and GrowUp Farms founder Kate Hofman was named Southeast Sustainability Entrepreneur of the Year 2023 in the Great British Entrepreneur Awards.
GrowUp Farms became the first vertical farm in the UK to launch a branded, ready-to-eat bagged salad into a major supermarket group with the launch of Fresh Leaf Co. into Iceland stores in February 2023. Fresh Leaf Co. is also now stocked in SPAR stores too.
Last summer, GrowUp Farms also launched Unbeleafable, a range of ready-to-eat bagged salad grown at its farm in Kent. The salad collection is available to buy at Tesco stores across the UK.
The salad leaves that are grown at the farm are longer lasting than other salad brand on the market because they are grown in a controlled environment without pesticides or being chlorine washed – all processes that degrade the leaves.
Reflecting on the awards success, GrowUp Farms founder Kate Hofman said: “It’s a real honour to win SME of the Year award. While our journey as an SME began 10 years ago in a small shipping container on a roof in east London, the last year has really seen us reap the rewards of all of the hard work that we have put into getting to this point. Being able to say that we are the first vertical farm to launch a branded ready-to-eat salad into a supermarket group with leaves that last longer than other bagged salad is a huge achievement, and something we are proud of.
“We are grateful to the edie judges for recognising all of the work that we have undertaken to create a vertical farm that truly lessens the impact of its activity on the environment. We are ambitious, optimistic and passionate about growing salad leaves in the most sustainable way possible so that we can feed the nation with home-grown leaves all year round.”
Pioneering vertical farm GrowUp Farms has appointed Will Howard as its new UK MD and CCO.
Howard, former MD at baby-food brand Ella’s Kitchen, who joined GrowUp Farms in February, was brought in to help GrowUp unlock their purpose of providing “Better Food For All” and support the team building the business to grow and sell more than one million bags of salad per week.
GrowUp Farms CEO Marcus Whately said: “We are thrilled to have Will on board. He has nearly 20 years’ experience with major food and drink brands – and two of them with B Corps – so he absolutely shares our passion for marrying sustainability in food production with creating compelling brands. He is committed to business as a force for good and will be a great addition to our team.
“We have always been a pioneering organisation, but we can’t rest on our laurels and Will gives us the injection of experience and energy which will ensure we continue to grow great tasting products that will help us grow the category.”
A certified B Corp, GrowUp Farms is the first vertical farm to supply major UK supermarkets with bagged salad brands with the launch of Fresh Leaf Co. into Iceland and SPAR and the Unbeleafable range into Tesco – both already award-winning brands.
Talking about his appointment to the newly created role of UK MD and CCO, Howard said: “I am extremely excited to be joining the team at GrowUp Farms, a vertical farm which is doing things differently, even compared to other vertical farms, and leading the way in how companies provide the best, most sustainable food for all, without compromising on taste. With a clear purpose to grow “better food for all”, a brilliant team and values to help guide how we get there, it won’t be long before we are growing nearly 1.4 million bags of salad per week.
“My two daughters, aged nine and 12, are thrilled about my new role at GrowUp Farms. They love snacking on the salad leaves straight from the bag and are probably on their way to becoming our top consumers!”
Prior to his roles at Ella’s Kitchen, Howard worked at Innocent Drinks, Red Bull and PepsiCo.
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“From a consumer point of view, everybody buys bag salad because it’s healthy and convenient,” says Kate Hofman, co-founder of pioneering UK vertical farm GrowUp. She then turns the tables and asks how I feel about the experience. It is, I respond, usually a wilting, unsatisfying one.
Hofman is expecting my answer. “It doesn’t matter where you shop or what bag of salad you buy, it’s how everyone feels and hates the fact that it doesn’t stay fresh for long enough,” she says.
“We saw this unusual commercial opportunity where we could produce a product that really solved a consumer problem.”
Last year, GrowUp’s Unbeleafable brand became the first-ever salad range grown by a vertical farm in the UK stocked in Tesco. Given that the UK imports around 90% of its salad through winter, this was a breakthrough moment for the homegrown, year-round product with longer-lasting leaves.
“The powerful thing for me is developing a brand which people are engaging with and starting to trust,” says Hofman, who is also chief brand officer. “There aren’t a lot of brands in produce as historically it’s been impossible to guarantee the quality and reliability of the product. But we can deliver utility and consistency year round.”
GrowUp Farms opened its Kent site in Pepperness in late 2022, with £100 million equity-backed funding. By using vertical farming techniques, the vast hanger-style warehouse grows fresh, pesticide-free salad indoors, employing hydroponics and LED lighting to optimise growth conditions while minimising water usage and environmental impact.
GrowUp Farms is a pioneer in UK vertical farming and has spent over a decade growing restaurant-quality salad.
Having worked as a management consultant at IBM, Hofman took a sabbatical to do a Masters in environmental technology in business at Imperial College. She calls herself “an accidental entrepreneur” after seeing potential in what was called urban farming back in 2012.
As her interest heightened, she met her now co-founder, engineer Tom Webster, through a mutual friend.
“We were really interested in making sustainable food more affordable for more people,” she says. “And growing it in a way that recruited the environmental impact.”
The duo started with their first aquaponics venture (The GrowUp Box) courtesy of a shipping container with a greenhouse on top, which in a car park by London’s Borough Market.
Both living close by, they would cycle over at 5am and worked with restaurants and traders at the market.
“People loved the story and the quality. It convinced us that there was something there to scale to the production and products which would have a meaningful impact.”
Their next farm (Unit 84) saw them take on an existing warehouse and install a growing system. Upgrading from bikes to an electric van for deliveries, they sold into New Covent Garden and retailers, including Whole Foods, across London.
“Even back then, in 2014, we recognised we had this fantastic way of growing a delicious product and if we were to bring growing indoors into a controlled environment, we needed energy for it,” she recalls.
With carbon footprints and net zero yet to weave its way into the business psyche, GrowUp ran a lifecycle analysis to understand the impact.
Hofman says: “You have to run a vertical farm on renewable energy otherwise the carbon footprint of what you are doing is higher than the conventional supply chain. We had to think ahead and ways of solving the energy part of food production.”
GrowUp Farms was founded by Kate Hofman and Tom Webster in 2013 – with their container box near Borough Market.
The founders worked with a partner who had built three renewable power stations in the UK — including in Speyside for whisky manufacturing — to provide heat and energy to local industry. Businesses were directly plugged in and benefiting from the renewable heat and with GrowUp looking for infrastructure they could build a farm next to, they landed upon a site in Kent.
“We realised that energy and food production are two sides of the same coin,” adds Hofman.
The two businesses merged, with Marcus Whately taking over as GrowUp Farms’ CEO. The first seeds were planted in Sandwich in November 2022 — a decade on from their container box idea — while their first products hit supermarket shelves last February.
“What you are doing is creating the perfect growing conditions for your farm 365 days a year,”
says Hofman, with conditions and temperature mimicking Italy and Spain where the UK imports its salads from.
“For plants to be healthy and happy, it needs light, water but also the right temperature and airflow. For environmentally controlled aspects of the growing we use renewable heat which makes it a much more cost effective way of running a farm.”
GrowUp Farms newest vertical farm is near Sandwich in Kent. It combines innovative farming technology with renewable energy.
In 2021, electricity would have accounted for around 25% of a vertical farm’s operating costs, but that has now risen up to 50%. GrowUp, says Hofman, use 40% less electricity and save around £7.3m from being on site in Sandwich.
“That’s a significant saving for any business but there are lots of challenges for vertical farms with rising energy prices,” she adds.
GrowUp uses up to 94% less water than traditional growing, while the company hopes to further break down the supply chain barrier with its fresh produce over current import challenges. Hofman says: “It’s how we build more resilience into the UK’s food system.”
The farm’s success last year led to Hofman being invited to the Downing Street Farm to Food summit as an industry expert, alongside traditional farmers. The summit was held in response to a 40-year low in domestic salad production.
“GrowUp Farms is part of the evolution of the great British farming tradition, helping to build a more sustainable food system for the UK,” she says. “We are doing things differently and making it mainstream, and businesses like ours have never been more needed for UK food production.”
Company & location: GrowUp Farms in Sandwich, Kent
Education: Event management at Canterbury Christ Church University
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? I dreamt of becoming a West End dancer, inspired by my mum who was a dance teacher.
Why did you decide to go for a career in food & drink? I am a massive foodie! So that was the initial inspiration for looking into a career in food and drink, and GrowUp Farms’ vision of being an innovative and pioneering vertical farm attracted me.
“This is the future of food and something I am really interested in”
The highly controlled indoor environment the team have built, using state-of-the-art technology to create the perfect Mediterranean spring climate 365 days a year to grow salad leaves, is going to play a key role in helping the UK to become self-sufficient in growing salad and scaling back our reliance on overseas imports.
It means salad is now grown in the UK all year round and two brands – Fresh Leaf Co and Unbeleafable – are now available to buy in Iceland and Tesco respectively. This is the future of food and something I am really interested in.
Explain your job to us in a sentence (or two): My job is a dynamic mix of tasks, ranging from designing marketing materials and packaging, handling social media accounts to organising the Christmas party.
What does a typical day look like for you? Every day is unique with a huge variety of different tasks, including going inside the farm itself to get salad samples, liaising with our creative agencies, designing adverts for our latest brand Unbeleafable, copywriting and organising internal and external events.
Tell us how you went about applying for your job: Getting hired at GrowUp Farms involved three interviews, with the final stage requiring a presentation to the founder, Kate Hofman, where I had to outline strategies for a successful product launch and marketing campaigns.
It was very daunting, and I put everything I had into the last interview. Thankfully, it paid off!
What’s the best part about working for a food & drink company? Being a part of a brand and concept I truly believe in.
And what’s the biggest misconception people have about working in food and drink? People often think it’s easy, as everyone needs food and drink, but we have to work hard to make a big impact in order to stand out from the crowd – which we are really achieving now.
What advice would you give to other young people looking to get into the food & drink industry? Gain diverse experiences, network, and stay passionate about the field.
What’s your ultimate career dream? Becoming a brand manager really appeals to me!
New technology which its designers hope will have a major impact on reducing wastewater has been trialled at a vertical farm.
Water treatment expert Salinity Solutions teamed up with indoor salad producer GrowUp Farms in Sandwich, Kent, for the 10 day trial.
Wastewater from the growing process, as well as elsewhere on the site, was collected and re-circulated twice, using a unique pressure system.
Liam Burlace, co-founder of Salinity Solutions, said: “This allows us to reach much higher recoveries making more fresh water accessible.”
At GrowUp Farms, crops are grown in layers under special LED lights
The standard technology used in the industry is called reverse osmosis, in which water is purified by pumping it through a semi-permeable membrane.
Salinity Solutions has developed a way of re-circulating the water, to treat it twice in an energy-efficient way.
Mr Burlace said: “The aim here is to treat water better, so we want to extract as much fresh water as possible, whilst minimising the energy consumption of the system.”
The GrowUp Farms’ Pepperness site spans just five acres in Sandwich, but has the equivalent of 1,000 acres of growing space in a controlled environment, powered by renewable energy.
Salad crops for supermarkets are grown in fertilised water, rather than soil.
GrowUp Farms says the ground-breaking batch reverse osmosis technology – the first in the world to be manufactured commercially – could have a major impact on reducing wastewater, not only in the food sector but in many other sectors around the world, helping to solve the emerging global water crisis.
In the trial at the Sandwich site, rain water, water used for cleaning and “old” irrigation water were recycled.
Liam Burlace, who co-founded the company, said the aim was to “treat water better”
GrowUp Farms impact director, Gillon Dobie, said: “Globally, demand for water is set to double over the next five years.
“Water treatment consumes 4% of the world’s total electricity production and conventional reverse osmosis systems are traditionally energy intensive.
“Crucially, Salinity Solutions’ technology uses half the energy of existing systems while recovering up to 98% of clean water.”
Much of what is left over from the process is concentrated fertiliser, which can also potentially be recycled.
‘Fantastic innovations’
Senior lecturer in environment and sustainability at the University of Surrey, Dr Zoe M Harris, said: “Vertical farms are already fantastic innovations in that they already recycle their water. They are closed loops, recirculating systems. So we already have a saving there.
“By collaborating with Salinity Solutions, they are basically doubling up on their advantage.
“If they can further recover precious water and do that in a way that’s economic and sustainable, it really will escalate and push forward vertical farming and controlled environment industries to be more sustainable.”
Salinity said the technology could also be used outside the food sector, for example at wastewater treatment plants, where nutrients such as phosphates and nitrates need to be removed.
The trial has now finished and the results will be analysed.
From a small unit in London, GrowUp Farms has taken its vertical farming business to a larger site in Kent, where it supplies the likes of Tesco with British-grown salad all year round
It’s winter, it’s wet, and it’s cold – yet in Kent, salad is growing. No, this isn’t a particularly hardy breed of leaf. This is GrowUp’s vertical farm in Pepperness. Comprising the equivalent of 1,000 acres of Grade 1 farmland, it can produce bags of salad in just over three weeks – whatever the weather.
When fully operational, the site will produce 1.4 million bags per week, which equates to between 2.5% and 3% of the UK’s salad supply.
It’s an ambitious target for an ambitious brand. GrowUp already supplies Tesco and Iceland under its Unbeleafable and Fresh Leaf Co brands, and reports increasing interest from other major retailers. It’s now looking to grow new varieties, and could even play a part in boosting national food security.
Plants stay in the growing chambers for between 17 and 21 days
It may sound an outlandish claim, but much of the UK’s salad comes from abroad, points out Kate Hofman, who founded GrowUp with Tom Webster over 10 years ago. As shortages become more common, especially in the winter months, consumers will gravitate towards UK-grown produce “because they’ll associate that with stability and availability”, she believes.
The growth trajectory of GrowUp certainly suggests there is a market for its proposition. Hofman and Webster started out in a small unit in London supplying a few foodservice clients. Today, they are heads of a thriving business with more than 80 employees.
The aim is not to wipe out conventional growing methods, rather to “top up” supply and reduce reliance on imports, says Hofman. “There’s no reason why we should be importing salad if we can grow it here,” she argues.
Seeds are planted in trays prior to entering the growing chamber
Vertical farming offers additional benefits, too. Its short turnaround time means GrowUp can be responsive to events that create a peak in demand, such as an upcoming bank holiday or good weather.
What’s more, no pesticides are needed, so the product doesn’t have to be washed and dried. This means better quality, less damaged leaves, says the brand. It also means the leaves stay fresher for longer – allowing for longer use-by dates.
The Pepperness site houses the equivalent of 1,000 acres of Grade 1 farmland
Selling points
That longer shelf life is something that particularly attracts consumers, Hofman says. As such, this is one of the core selling points highlighted on pack, alongside the lack of pesticides and British origin.
Notably, there is no mention of vertical farming on packs. Hofman says this is because people don’t want all the technical information. Instead, the brand focuses on being “primarily a product that solves the problem consumers have, which is freshness”.
The seeding station
Behind the scenes, though, that technical information is key for growing. Seeds are planted in trays with a plant-based composite matter used as a replacement for soil, and left to germinate for between 24 and 48 hours. The plants are then moved into the growing chamber, where they stay for between 17 and 21 days, depending on the variety and specification.
The details are also crucial when it comes to GrowUp’s sustainability goals. A key priority has been to address the vast amount of energy required for vertical farms.
The Unbeleafable salad range is stocked in Tesco
While many rivals still use a combination of energy sources, GrowUp’s Pepperness site is “ahead of the curve”, says Hofman. It sources low-grade heat and electricity from an on-site renewable energy plant that produces the same amount of power as 350 acres of solar panels.
GrowUp also works with Kent Wildlife Trust to invest in rewilding projects and continues to explore how to reduce plastic – a key part of its next phase.
Looking further ahead, Hofman points to “really exciting” vertical farming crop developments on the horizon, from okra and berries to seed potatoes. The sheer scale of Pepperness means it is on the frontline in making these crops a commercial reality.
The salad leaves are prepared for quality control
It’s all part of ensuring GrowUp prioritises “real innovation” as it expands. It will look at heritage and heirloom varieties, for example, rather than just “tinkering around the edges with pack size”, Hofman says.
But for now, the main goal for Hofman is simple: to keep salad on UK shelves all year round. Even in a wet and miserable winter.
At GrowUp Farms, crops are grown in layers under special LED lights
Liam Burlace, who co-founded the company, said the aim was to “treat water better”
