How Oishii’s Vertical Farm Grows Strawberries That Sell for $20 a Box

news7f07/16/2022

3 4 minutes read

How Oishii's Vertical Farm Grows Strawberries That Sell for $20 a Box

Oishii doesn’t grow your typical strawberries. For starters, a box of six extra-large berries once sold for $50 at Whole Foods.

The New Jersey-based company’s berries also don’t taste like your typical strawberries: They’re sweeter, with a denser palate. Flavors, aromas and “butter textures” are designed at three vertical farms: two in New Jersey and one in Los Angeles.

“[The strawberries] Hiroki Koga, co-founder and CEO of Oishii, tells CNBC Make It.

Koga, a former vertical farm consultant in Japan, immigrated to California to attend UC Berkeley’s MBA program in 2015. While shopping at a local market, he noticed that American strawberries looked “glossy” , big and delicious”, but actually “watery and lacking in flavor.”

Co-Founder and CEO Hiroki Koga on Oishii’s Vertical Strawberry Farm. Its facility in Jersey City is the largest vertical strawberry farm in the world, according to Koga.

Courtsey by Oishii

After graduating in 2017, Koga and co-founder Brendan Somerville, a recent MBA graduate from UCLA, set out to build a vertical strawberry farm on their own. There wasn’t a blueprint to follow: At the time, vertical farms were mostly green vegetables, which grew relatively quickly and didn’t need bee pollinators to thrive. And despite her consulting experience, Koga has never actually built one on her own before.

Somerville and Koga watched YouTube videos to find out how to grow the farm and spent a year with consultants figuring out how to maintain the right environment for both the strawberries and the bees that need to pollinate the plants.

The result: Oishii vertical farms are both greener and cleaner than a conventional farm. And though $50 boxes regularly sell out, the company recently lowered the price to $20 per box — a step toward its ultimate goal of making eco-friendly food more accessible. accessible to everyone, not just those with extra money.

Here’s what you’ll get for paying $20 for a box of 6 extra large, 8 large, or 11 medium:

Guaranteed and measurable sweetness

Oishii’s largest vertical farm is in Jersey City, New Jersey. At 74,000 square feet, it’s also the largest vertical farm in the world, according to Koga. The facility features a vertical farm, office space, and a lab, where berries from each harvest are tested for Brix, or sugar content that indicates sweetness.

“Conventional farms in the US can Brix anywhere between 4 and 7 or 8. If you’re really lucky, it’s 9,” says Koga. “Depending on the season, our strawberries always have a Brix of 10 to 15. It’s a completely different quality.”

Oishii grows Omakase strawberries, from a specific region in Northern Japan. There, berries are considered a delicacy because of their rare taste, aroma, and softness.

CNBC Make It

Grocery store strawberries are often processed to preserve, impregnated with pesticides, and picked unripe. That’s how California strawberries can make their way into the Midwest or East Coast kitchens – but it comes at the expense of the berry’s softness and deliciousness.

Oishii isn’t even trying to tackle the same problem: The company only ships and sells in stores within a 20-mile radius of its vertical farms. Koga admits that shipping strawberries nationwide will improve sales, but says Oishii’s farms are already producing strawberries at full capacity – and shipping to longer distances could do reduce the quality of strawberries grown at low temperatures to preserve freshness.

“We don’t want to be just a social and sustainable company, but we really want to offer a better product than what is available,” says Koga.

Smaller environmental footprint and bigger impact

When a box of six strawberries costs $50 each, one strawberry costs $8.33. Even today’s reduced price of $3.33 per berry is still pretty expensive.

Oishii once sold a pack of six “first flowers” for $50. Currently priced at $20, they are Oishii’s most expensive offering because they are larger and more nutritious than other strawberries. They flower first and stay on the plant longer before harvesting.

CNBC Make It

Koga says the cost reflects both the quality of the fruit and its production value. Oishii strawberries are grown without pesticides, and use less water than traditional farming methods. And because they’re grown inside, they don’t take away nutrients from the farmland.

“Sometimes people ask us, ‘Are you taking away farmers’ jobs? “. “But the reality is quite the opposite, because we don’t have enough farmers to feed [the world’s] Growing population and vertical farming allows us to grow crops much more efficiently. “

That’s part of the reason Oishii changed its price point, even though the company sells out regular $50 boxes: Proving that vertical farming can make affordable produce can encourage sea change in agriculture – a $1 trillion industry in the US alone by 2020, according to United States Department of Agriculture.

Until then, Oishii’s farms were still quite expensive to operate. But Koga notes that new technology often follows a similar route, starting out complex and extremely expensive before eventually becoming more affordable, affordable and ubiquitous, like smartphones. and electric cars. “We justified the price by offering something that didn’t exist on the market yet,” he said.

Koga says Oishii’s next step is to expand into other forms of production – possibly tomatoes and melons first – while considering the time-consuming cost of building more vertical farming facilities. to meet the needs.

“We’re very confident we’ll make this even more effective in the next 5 years, 10 years, and really get to the point where [vertical farming] becomes the new standard where this becomes even more affordable than conventional products,” he said.