{"id":5276,"date":"2023-02-10T22:28:01","date_gmt":"2023-02-10T22:28:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/10\/from-shipping-container-to-table-adapt-brings-urban-mushroom-farms-to-us\/"},"modified":"2023-02-10T22:28:01","modified_gmt":"2023-02-10T22:28:01","slug":"from-shipping-container-to-table-adapt-brings-urban-mushroom-farms-to-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/10\/from-shipping-container-to-table-adapt-brings-urban-mushroom-farms-to-us\/","title":{"rendered":"From shipping container to table: Adapt brings urban mushroom farms to US"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Canadian vertical farming startup Adapt AgTech<\/a> is partnering with Reef Technology to bring its mushroom-growing shipping containers to major cities across the United States, starting with Austin.<\/p>\n

Reef transforms urban real estate like parking lots into mobility and logistical hubs<\/a> and currently operates over 8,000 locations across hundreds of cities. The partnership will help Adapt place its shipping containers steps away from such customers as restaurants and grocery stores, without having to pay the astronomical rent of a commercial or industrial space in a downtown area.<\/p>\n

Adapt opened its first shipping container in Austin and began deliveries to restaurants this week. Over the course of the next few years, the startup plans to expand to over 50 locations, including Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and Miami.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur model is to create hyper-local farms in densely populated urban areas to reduce the distance from farm to fork,\u201d Jonathan Murray, Adapt AgTech\u2019s CEO and founder, told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n

Adapt\u2019s network of shipping container farms specializes in \u201caberrant gourmet mushrooms,\u201d which are gourmet mushrooms that haven\u2019t been available in North American retail until very recently. Think pink, yellow, blue and king oysters, chestnut mushrooms, and the trending lion\u2019s mane.<\/p>\n

\u201cMushrooms cater very, very well to container farming versus other crops like leafy greens because of the energy consumption,\u201d continued Murray. \u201cThey don\u2019t require a tremendous amount of light. It\u2019s really just temperature and humidity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adapt, which launched in February 2022, delivered its first farm in June last year to a location in Toronto. The company has been growing ever since and now has farms in Ottawa, Vancouver, Halifax, Kingston and Austin. On February 17, Adapt says it will launch a partnership with Loblaws \u2014 Canada\u2019s largest retailer \u2014 starting with two flagship stores in downtown Toronto, and then dozens more in Toronto and Ottawa before expanding elsewhere over the following months.<\/p>\n

Adapt will also roll out with retail banners under Canadian grocery chains Sobeys and Pattison Food Group in 2023.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the end of 2023 we\u2019ll be available in stores of at least three of the top five largest retailers in Canada from Halifax to Vancouver and in between, which combined represent over 3,500 stores,\u201d said Murray.<\/p>\n

Adapt recently closed a seed round with climate VC Congruent, and it will use the funds to expand its base and hire more support.<\/p>\n

Sustainable fruiting, cheaper mushrooms<\/h2>\n
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Image Credits:<\/strong> Adapt AgTech<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Adapt AgTech designs and manufactures its shipping containers in Delta, British Columbia. Aside from the five containers operating today, Adapt recently started production on 16 more units and is aiming to deploy over 25 units over the next 12 months. Some of Adapt\u2019s shipping containers are solar-powered with backup plugs, but for the purposes of a speedy U.S. launch, the startup will plug its shipping containers into the grid. The energy consumption, Murray said, is low \u2014 about 10 kilowatt hours per day.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s distribution model is akin to a hub and spoke. Adapt uses a centralized hub in Kingston, Ontario, to do all of the lab work and colonize the substrate blocks \u2014 meaning it allows the mycelium, the root structure of the fungus, to grow on blocks of sawdust, spent coffee grounds or coconut coir. The startup then sends out the blocks to shipping containers, where the mushrooms can fruit close to customers. Murray says this allows Adapt to deliver mushrooms within a couple of hours of harvest, which not only means fresher fungi, but also longer-lasting mushrooms and reduced spoilage.<\/p>\n

The startup deploys and operates the containers and also fulfills orders. An operator oversees everything from harvesting to managing orders to delivering mushrooms.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of our containers are currently operating essentially on one full-time farmer, so we\u2019re enabling them to become what we like to call \u2018farmtrepreneurs,’\u201d said Murray. \u201cSo uncapped commissions, grow your territory as big as you can. We\u2019ll add containers, we\u2019ll grow your territories. This allows us to bring new and young people into farming as well, which is exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Murray also noted that existing mushroom farm operators have reached out to Adapt to flip their at-home businesses into Adapt farms.<\/p>\n

The whole process allows the startup to stay vertically integrated, and thus save money on materials like substrate, which Adapt makes itself out of whatever is locally available. Adapt\u2019s control over each farm also lets the company keep tabs on well-fruiting mushroom strains and propagate more of them, delivering even healthier margins to the company and a high-quality product that\u2019s cheaper than what you\u2019d get at the farmer\u2019s market, said Murray.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n


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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Canadian vertical farming startup Adapt AgTech is partnering with Reef Technology to bring its mushroom-growing shipping containers to major cities across the United States, starting with Austin. Reef transforms urban real estate like parking lots into mobility and logistical hubs and currently operates over 8,000 locations across hundreds of cities. The partnership will help Adapt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5277,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5276","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}