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See Rooftop, Page 27

on the riseretailers offer insights and predictions for the coming year

at modern Baking’s roundtable event

Continued on Page 22

rooftop Farm to Grow forGrocersBy MICHAEL GARRY

NeW YOrK — Next spring, Whole Foods Market stores in the New York Metropoli-tan area — including seven in Manhattan — will have a new local source of fresh pro-duce: an “urban farm” that uses hydroponic technology to grow fruits and vegetables year-round in a rooftop green-house.

The 12,000-square-foot greenhouse is currently un-der construction on the roof of a one-story church in Jamaica, in the New York borough of Queens. It is the brainchild and inaugural project of Gotham Greens here, a designer, builder and operator of urban farms that is part of a small but growing movement to produce food atop stores, schools and other city dwellings.

While hydroponic green-houses have been built for re-search purposes at universities and elsewhere — and conven-tional soil-based greenhouses are not uncommon in urban settings — Gotham Greens believes its $1.4 million facil-ity will be the first commer-cial-scale hydroponic rooftop farm in the U.S.

After the greenhouse begins operating next year, Gotham Greens expects to grow more than 30 tons of produce annually and sell it directly to local supermarkets and restaurants, as well as to the New York City Terminal Produce Co-operative Mar-ket, a wholesale operation based in the Bronx.

Whole Foods is the only future retailer customer named so far by Gotham Greens. “We’ve had pre-

By KATherINe MArTIN

The past 18 months have been volatile; once commodities and gas prices settled, the economy took a nosedive, and consumers started to closely monitor expenditures. In-store bakers are left to figure out how to generate the most sales in an industry that is impulse-purchase driven.

Fortunately, as more consumers eschew restaurants and go to supermarkets more frequently, the in-store bakeries are seeing higher customer counts. And, although bakery items are not a necessity, they are an affordable treat. Traditionally, bakery has proved to be recession resistant.Bakery products are often the cornerstone of holidays and celebrations, so the baking industry should be able to weather the economic decline.

Modern Baking, a Chicago-based sister publication of Supermarket News, recently gathered several in-store bakery leaders from different areas of the country to share their predictions for the future of in-store baking

and what methods they will employ to ensure the future remains bright.

These retailers included Bill Mihu, vice president, bakery operations, Schnuck Markets, St. Louis; Kevin Kruse, bakery plant manager for Schnucks; John Rose, category manager, fresh foods, Brookshire Grocery, Tyler, Texas; Steve Schulte, bakery coordinator, Whole Foods Market, South region, Atlanta; David Hay, bakery merchandiser/trainer, Roche Bros., Wellesley Hills, Mass.; and Jerry Cedrone, director of deli & seafood for Roche Bros.

Katherine Martin, chief editor of Modern Baking, moderated the conversation.

This retail roundtable was sponsored by BakeMark, and the following are excerpts from the discussion, which was originally published in the August 2009 issue of Modern Baking. Additional news regarding the roundtable can be found at modern-baking.com.

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©2009 PENTON MEDIA. For permissions and reprint requests, please contact Joel Kirk, Penton Reprints, at 888-858-8851 or jkirk@penton.com. September 21, 2009 sN 21

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liminary conversations with other stores and have verbal agreements with produce managers,” said Viraj Puri, one of the founders of Go-tham Greens. Whole Foods declined to comment.

Puri said the greenhouse will grow a variety of pro-duce, including lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, basil and parsley, and sell it at “com-petitive prices.”

The greenhouse will be irrigated by captured rain-water and powered by 2,000 square feet of solar panels located on the rooftop of an adjacent building, which like the church is owned by the Greater Jamaica Development Corp. No fertilizer or pesticide will be needed. By employing hydroponics, the facility re-places soil with nutrient-rich water as the medium in which the produce grows.

“Hydroponics uses a ster-ile, controlled environment that ensures high quality and freshness without the risk of pathogens like E. coli and salmonella,” said Puri.

The quality of the produce grown at the greenhouse will be enhanced by its “proximity to market,” Puri noted. “After we harvest tomatoes, they will

be in stores a few hours later.” Conventionally grown toma-toes, by contrast, “can take up to a week to get to stores.”

Moreover, there will be relatively little handling of the produce. “It will be har-vested, packaged and de-livered to stores,” he said. “There will be no middlemen or brokers.”

Gotham Greens, which received an endorsement from New York Mayor Mi-chael Bloomberg, has secured more than $1 million in fi-

nancing, including $400,000 from the New York Business Development Corp. and an equal amount from the New York State Energy Research Development Authority.

By employing solar energy and capturing waste heat, the greenhouse will approach “carbon neutrality,” Gotham Greens said. Its electrical load will be minimized through the use of natural ventilation, evaporative cooling, and high-efficiency pumps and fans.

Supermarket FarmSGotham Greens was formed a year ago by several in-dividuals, including Puri, who previously worked for BrightFarm Systems, also based here, another designer of hydroponic rooftop green-houses that contributed to the design of the Gotham Greens project.

Last year, BrightFarm de-signed a demonstration-scale hydroponic greenhouse for a new Whole Foods store in Millburn, N.J. The green-house, based in a window-facing room inside the store, has grown a variety of herbs — lavender, rosemary, thyme, basil, oregano, cilantro and parsley — that are used in the store’s prepared-food de-

partment and restaurant, ac-cording to Danielle Gould, associate, BrightFarm Sys-tems. The room is also used as an education center.

The herbs are grown in lines of “vertical growing tow-ers” deployed along the win-dow frontage “to make best use of the available light,” said Gould. Whole Foods de-clined to comment, though it provides information about the store on its website.

BrightFarms is “in dis-cussions” with food retailers

about building hydroponic greenhouses above stores, said Gould, declining to identify the retailers. “We are current-ly working with a number of supermarkets to quantify the opportunity for integrating commercially profitable farms onto their rooftops.”

For supermarkets, which could harness waste heat from refrigeration systems to sup-port a greenhouse operation, growing produce on a rooftop would be the ultimate in lo-cal sourcing. “It makes a great deal of sense to locate stores close to the point of produc-tion and cut down on trans-portation,” said Gould. “Most supermarkets are trying to cut their fleet’s carbon impact.”

BrightFarms, working on behalf of its parent company New York Sun Works, was also responsible for the de-sign of “The Science Barge,” a barge docked in the Hud-son River off Yonkers, N.Y., that features a demonstration of sustainable food produc-tion using hydroponics and renewable energy. The barge is supervised by Groundwork Hudson Valley, Yonkers.

An even more ambitious urban farming concept was described last month in The New York Times by Dickson Despommier, professor of health at Columbia Universi-ty. In an opinion piece titled “A Farm on Every Floor,” De-spommier discussed the pros-pects for a “vertical farm,” a tall building encompassing hydroponic and aeroponic farming activity from top to bottom. He has started a busi-ness to build vertical farms.

Despommier is also a pro-ponent of supermarkets start-ing to grow their own produce on the rooftops of stores. “The supermarket of the future could produce 50% of the produce it sells,” he said. He envisions food retailers build-ing a two- or three-story light-weight plastic structure on top of a store that would support a robust hydroponic produce farming operation. “It would use no pesticides, herbicides or fertilizer, and there would be zero transportation,” he said. “The payback would be incredible.”

The need for this type of farming will increase over the next decades, Despom-mier said, as the earth’s popu-

lation grows and arable land becomes less available. “If cli-mate change and population growth progress at their cur-rent pace, in roughly 50 years farming as we know it will no longer exist,” he wrote in his New York Times piece.

rooftop Farm to Grow for Grocersfresh

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Many believe rooftop greenhouses could take local foods to the next level.