A “cool” looking unit that grows everything from kale to cilantro has been installed in in Richmond’s Safeway Seafair.
“People have been curious because the unit looks really cool,” said Winson Tam, assistant manager at Safeway Seafair.
The unit is a new vertical farming platform that grows produce including lettuce, baby kale as well as herbs such as basil, cilantro and parsley in store.
Safeway Seafair is one of 14 Safeway and four Thrifty stores across Greater Vancouver to introduce the urban farming technology designed by Infarm.
Rachel Draper, Vancouver city operations manager at Infarm, told the Richmond News that urban farmers with Infarm will be visiting each store to prepare the produce for shoppers.
“We can see the product from the seedling stage to a mature plant and urban farmers would go to the stores twice a week to take care of the plants, package them and put them out for sale,” said Draper.
She added that the units are monitored by AI technology that controls the temperature and lighting to give the plants a “perfect environment to grow in.”
According to Infarm, the vertical system uses 95 per cent less water, 90 per cent less transportation and 75 per cent less fertilizer than industrial agriculture.
Tam added, “It’s pretty exciting because (the farming unit) is very different than what you’d normally see in a grocery store and for us to be offering to our customers an innovation like this is just really cool.”
Infarm is a Berlin-based company founded in 2013 with an aim to move sustainable and local farming indoors, while preventing chemical damage to the Earth.
