GrowPura UK

This interview details GrowPura, an indoor farming company based in the UK. The interview is with Jeremy McNamara, Chief Commercial Officer of GrowPura.

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What is the origin story of GrowPura?

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The GrowPura story started around ten years ago in 2013 when the founder, Nick Bateman, turned his attention to vertical farming.

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Nick’s journey took him through several technology iterations with a relentless focus to address the key challenges in vertical farming, namely cracking the code of the economic model of controlled environment growing to deliver great tasting food at regular prices, ie with no premium to field or glasshouse grown crops.

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The current GrowPura technology solution has a compelling combination of lower relative capex and opex than traditional vertical farms creating increased yield per square metre of building footprint.

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What are some of the biggest challenges facing GrowPura in the future? 

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Our biggest challenge is to scale up our technology quickly in order to prove our economic model and to restore faith in the sector after the recent problems many of the big growers have run into.

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It is an exciting time and we have several really interesting conversations ongoing at the moment and the team feels it is on the verge of doing something rather special very soon.

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What is unique about GrowPura compared to competitors? 

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The GrowPura technology creates an environment that is very close to natural conditions for the plants. It does this by moving the plants continually, creating positive horticultural benefits by making the crops stronger and more consistent, and economic benefits due to the crop density that we can achieve via the technology. There are a whole host of advantages to using the GrowPura vertical farming system compared to traditional VF methods. These include using 50% less LED lighting, 50-75% less space requirements, resulting in 100-300% more output.

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We are confident that our system delivers unrivalled financial and environmental advantages compared with other growing technology.

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How do you measure the impact of GrowPura so far? (Revenue, Employees, Customer Quantity, Production Volume) etc? 

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We are a small company with big ambitions. Our R&D centre in Bedforshire is open for business and is growing crops right now. Everyone who visits feels the energy and intellectual capital that we have in our team, ranging from plant scientists, AI experts and electro-mechanical engineers. Combined with the commercial focus that we have, this is a winning combination. 

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What has Jeremy learned that he wishes he knew when he started the company? 

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I’m learning all the time.

I love spending time with our engineers and our plant scientists.

Most important is probably the sweet spot that we have created between horticulture, engineering and financial benefits for our clients.

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How can people connect with you or learn more about GrowPura?

You can write directly to me at Jeremy.mcnamara@growpura.com, or contact our PR agency at growpura@ceres-pr.co.uk

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