Driscoll's and Plenty Partnership - Part 2

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

As we reported yesterday, Driscoll’s recently offered some big validation to the controlled environment ag industry by partnering and investing in Plenty, a San-Francisco-based vertical farming company.

Plenty CSO Dr. Nate Storey sees this as a big boost for indoor ag.

Storey… “Driscoll's is really kind of providing this rocket fuel for the indoor ag work we're doing at Plenty. They're coming along and saying, 'Hey, listen, we've got this deep pool of genetics. We're experts. We know strawberries in and out. How can we use our expertise to help you guys develop your platform? How can we co-develop this thing together?' And, you know, that's pretty exciting for us. It's exciting for them. It's a new frontier and it solves some of the problems that they've been looking at over the years and scratching their heads. And, and for us, it solves some problems that, you know, we've been looking at and scratching our heads over. So this is a great partnership. We're really excited about it.”

This certainly appears to be a long term commitment to advancing indoor agriculture, but many are probably wondering: when will vertically grown strawberries be available at the grocery store?

Storey… “Well, I mean, I think we've got a couple of years of work with Driscoll's here. And so there are no firm dates at this point. We still have a lot of things to work through to bring strawberries to the world at scale. And that's probably all I can say about strawberries right now. But I will say that folks can expect a pretty spectacular product when that time comes.”