An Albertsons store in Laguna Niguel, California
Scott Mlyn | CNBC
Vertical Farmer Plenty, an ag-tech unicorn backed by SoftBank, announced a partnership with Albertsons on Wednesday, marking the company’s first major retail sale.
Under the multi-year agreement, Plenty 430 stores at Albertsons in California will provide four types of greens – baby arugula, baby farmer’s cake, crispy lettuce and mizuna mix – priced between $ 4 and $ 5, in line with other organic greens.
The deal is a pivotal moment for the data-driven company, which is machine learning and using custom lighting to optimize for taste. Analytics runs deep into the company’s DNA; it has a roster of engineers – a fair share of that came from Tesla in the early stages of the company. They work alongside farmers, including the company’s two co-founders, and sensory scientists. The company says its long-term mission is to make nutrient-rich products accessible to 500 urban centers around the world.
The Albertsons deal is his first big step toward that goal. It follows a test run with the messages that began before the coronavirus pandemic forced people to stay home.
Plenty’s co-founder and CEO Matt Barnard said the company was able to deliver Albertsons’ stores uninterruptedly, providing the buyer with critical evidence of Plenty’s value.
“Her customers loved it and it started flying off its shelves and, at a category-leading pace,” Barnard said. When supply chains were disrupted in the early days of stay-at-home orders, Plenty delivered its resilience by keeping shelves. “There were times that Plenty was the only thing on the shelves,” he said.
The supporters include a long list of high-profile investors, including Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt, who helped the company $ 175 million in a Series D deal in January, bringing their total funds to $ 400 million and the valuation at $ 1.05 billion, according to Pitchbook data.
As Plenty, which currently ships to more than a dozen Albertstons stores, opposes the daunting task of delivering to hundreds more, the latest infusion of capital will help the attempt to bankroll. Barnard expects it could take a maximum of two years to fully increase its production.
To deliver all the stores, Plenty will rely on its newest, fully autonomous farm in Compton, California, which is still under construction. It is also unclear when it will open. But Barnard said its commercial farm in southern San Francisco, named Tigris, currently produces 200 plants per minute, and it continues to improve yields year after year.
“If you look at four years ago, our revenue was a third of what it is today. Our revenue has jumped from one year to the next,” Barnard said.
Plenty has to deal with challenges of doing too much, too hard. It placed plans last year to open another farm in Seattle, to prioritize its efforts on Southern California.
Plenty also has formidable competitors in vertical agriculture, including Kimbal Musk’s Square Roots and Larry Ellison’s Sensei Ag, Barnard said. But Barnard, who grew up on a farm, is not envious of the competition, saying Plenty’s monolingual focus on taste is what makes her products so unique.
“People are not used to taking vegetables with their fingers out of the box without a fork, without dressing and without other ingredients, because we are not used to them tasting that fantastic,” he said. “If you add that 365-day resiliency, that’s really the difference relative to what’s on the shelves right now.”
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