Local Grown Salads

This interview details Local Grown Salads, an indoor farming company based in the United States. The interview is with Zale Tabakman, President of Local Grown Salads.

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What is the origin story of Local Grown Salads?

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Local Grown Salads started when I was doing technology consulting work in Canada. I had two interesting clients, a technology company that added dissolved oxygen into water and a catering company producing 3000 sandwiches a day. Add to the mix were my five teenagers who I fed several times a week as a divorced dad. So food was always on my mind. Through the Dissolved Oxygen client, I learned the massive increase in growth dissolved oxygen gives to plants and fish. 

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The sandwich chef explained to me the problems of getting consistent fresh vegetables every day, especially during the winter months.  And of course, the kids showed me the insatiable demand for food. All of this was spinning in my mind and one day while riding my bike I looked at all the roofs in Toronto and asked myself, why are we not growing there? 

I started to do the numbers and figured out that horizontally we couldn't make any money. But, if we increased the volume per square foot, eureka, we could make money.

The next question was, how hard could that be? It seemed very straightforward and easy. A million dollars later of R&D we figured it out it was challenging to do it with any scale.

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What are some of the biggest challenges facing Local Grown Salads in the future? 

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We are launching 200 Indoor Vertical Farms in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and East Africa, It's a complicated project with lots of moving parts. Our technology has been designed to scale, so it's not a technology challenge, But launching that many locations in so many different locations. The root challenge will be finance, logistics, and ultimately people. We are working on putting together the right strategic partners. We want folks who share our vision of scale.

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What is unique about Local Grown Salads compared to competitors? 

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We have developed a different paradigm for the business of farming. The big difference between us and the competition is that they have taken traditional field and greenhouse approaches and added some lights. That is why so many fail. The paradigm of the entire process has to change, Real innovation in technology focuses on the paradigm, While all farmers need to seed, grow, harvest, package, and deliver, How we do each step can be radically different. Local Grown Salads has rethought every aspect of the process. From the seed and fertilizer to growing and finally to how we harvest, package, and deliver the vegetables.

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That is why we had to design everything from the reservoir to the lighting systems. That's the theory, now lets get real, we grow microgreens, herbs, leafy greens, and small vegetables all in the same location. Nobody else can do that. Which means we are a one-stop supplier for the last-mile distributor.  We grow truly in the vertical direction, which means we maximize every square inch and waste no energy. We have custom software for managing every step from seed sourcing to feedback from Mom serving her kids. These are the obvious differences, there are many more subtler ones embedded in our technology and software.

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What are some goals in 2024 and beyond for Local Grown Salads?

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Our immediate focus is the launch of 200 Indoor Vertical Farms. This will bring us to our goal of being the supplier of record to companies who demand the same taste, shape, crunch, and colour of the arugula they receive from us in NYC as the same in Berlin and Riyadh.

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How can people connect with you or learn more about Local Grown Salads?

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The best way is on Website http://LocalGrownSalads.com or directly with me on Linkedin at http://LinkedIn.com/in/ZaleTabakman

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