Jones Food Company

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Overview

Jones Food Company is one of the leading vertical farming companies in Europe. According to the company, they own and operate the largest vertical farm in Europe. This flagship farm features approximately 26 tennis courts (5000 square meters) of growing space, 12 kilometers of LED Grow Lights, and is operational 365 days per year.

Their vertical farm features 17 layers of grow space, totaling approximately 12m, an average of about 2/3 meter height per layer. As far as crop types, the focus of Jones Food Company is on fresh herbs and leafy greens.

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Founders

The company was founded in 2016 by James-Lloyd Jones. In 2019, UK Retailer Ocado took a majority ownership in the company, acquiring 58% of the firm. Approximately one year later in September of 2020, Ocado was reported to have increased its stake in the company to 70%. The Ocado Group is a grocery solutions group founded in 2000 by Jonathan Faiman, Jason Gissing, and Tim Steiner in Hatfield, UK. The firm is not a grocery store but rather a business that licenses its technology to grocery retailers globally. Ocado group also owns a 50% joint stake in eGrocery website Ocado.com. Because of the businesses interests of Ocado Group, The Jones Food Company is uniquely positioned to service online grocery opportunities in the future.

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Stock

As a private company with majority ownership of the Ocado Group, stock in the Jones Food Company is not readily available on the open market. Given the strategic position of the Jones Food Company and its location outside of the US, the firm is less likely than other US-based, venture capital backed vertical farms to have an IPO in the short to medium term future.

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Revenue

The Jones Food Company's flagship facility focuses on leafy greens and herbs and has a size of approximately 5000 meters squared. This is equivalent to approximately 53,000 square feet in US metrics. We know from publicly available information that the revenue generated by AeroFarms form approximately 70,000 square feet of grow space is about $4M US / year. Therefore using this approximate comparison the estimated annual revenue of The Jones Food Company would be approximately $3M USD per year currently, or about $600 USD / m square of production space / year or about $56 USD revenue / square foot. This estimate is consistent with other public estimates of the firm's revenue, which guess "<$5M" (USD).

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Locations

The location of this vertical farm is in Scunthorpe, about a 4 drive north of London in the UK (approximately 400 miles).

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