Words
Gemma Latham
In 2013, strategy consultant Kate Hofman left her career at IBM to found GrowUp – the UK’s first commercial aquaponics urban farm, built on exciting new technology that’s set to transform the industry. ‘I enjoyed my work at IBM,’ says Hofman. ‘But it didn’t feel very fulfilling.’
While on sabbatical, studying environmental technology and business, Hofman learned about aquaponics, which combines aquaculture (fish farming) and hydroponics (growing plants in a nutritional solution). Aquaponics recirculates water in a closed-loop system – fish waste nourishes plants, which purify the water that goes back to the fish. ‘It was a real light-bulb moment,’ says Hofman. ‘It was an amazing concept that wasn’t really being done in the UK. It had very interesting potential for changing the food system but hadn’t yet been commercialised.’
Hofman went back to IBM but the idea remained, and she soon left to give it her full attention. She met like-minded Tom Webster, and the pair built the GrowUp box – a demonstration system in a shipping container. With a successful model in place, Hofman and Webster went into business together as CEO and COO, respectively.
GrowUp Urban Farms now calls a Beckton warehouse unit home. Room 1 houses the fish: 12 tanks each hold 400 tilapia, grown for six months before being sold, with the majority currently supplying the Thai restaurant chain Rosa’s.
Layer upon layer of foliage-covered trays line the long corridor of Room 2, which looks more like a data storage centre than a farm. ‘The actual footprint of this room is 180 square metres,’ says Webster.
‘But our vertical stacking system expands that space to 768 square metres.’ An efficient way to maximise the growing potential of urban areas, the benches are flourishing with pak choi, lettuce, watercress, spinach, rocket, pea shoots and micro herbs. But how do crops grown in artificial light compare to those grown in the sunlight? ‘A big part of how a plant grows, and the nutrients it contains, is about the light source it receives,’ says Webster. ‘Our plants are constantly fed with a very high quality and energy-efficient LED light source that is very stable and uniform, which means the crop itself is always the same quality and quantity year-round.’ Hofman agrees, ‘We’ve had really fantastic feedback on the quality – the restaurants we work with tell us they can’t get anything as good.’
But it’s not only the consistent quality and nutritional content that makes GrowUp so groundbreaking. The system is also more cost effective than traditional farming, taking into account the year-round production achieved through the controlled indoor environment; not to mention the reduction in transit costs on produce frequently imported from abroad.
The team is now focused on research and development for the next farm, which will be bigger and turn the enterprise into a profitable business. ‘We’re currently producing 3,000 100g bags of salad per week, but we need to scale up considerably,’ says Webster. ‘Our vision for this is not premium bagged salads and niche products. We want to be the basic salad and fish fingers on the supermarket shelves – protein and salad that people consume on a daily basis. That’s when we will be really making an impact.’
Passion and purpose is key to having the resilience to get a start-up off the ground
‘The long-term vision for us has always been to get this operating model to a point where it can happen at an industrial scale to compete with existing agriculture,’ says Hofman. ‘We hope to have the concept for the next farm completed by the end of the year, then it’s about raising the investment to get it built. It will then become a cookie-cutter model for us to roll out lots of farms across the UK and hopefully across the world.’
Helping them to realise this ambition is chariman Andrew Hodson who was assigned as mentor when they won a competition to join the Barclays Launchpad. ‘It was hugely helpful having Andrew to bounce ideas off,’ says Hofman. ‘He helped us put a good governing structure in place, and navigate our way through the world of equity investment. It’s really important to have external reports and viewpoints, but from somebody who knows the business well, and knows you well.’
Hofman says her corporate experience provided a sound foundation in areas such as behaving professionally and the importance of having good, structured processes in place. But, above all, she attests, ‘passion and purpose is key to having the resilience to get a start-up
off the ground’.
