80 Acres Farms

80 Acres Urban Agriculture (known as 80 Acres Farms) produces greens, herbs, and other vegetables for restaurants and grocery stores including Whole Foods Market, Kroger, and others. The company supplies to about 1,000 Kroger stores in the Midwest and Southeast. Its products can also be purchased online from Green Bean, Local Food Connection, and Yellow Bird. The company’s main goal is to sell affordable local foods that can be consumed within a day after harvest. As of January 2022, 80 Acres Farms operates nine facilities across six states in the US (Arkansas, Alabama, North Carolina, New York, Ohio and Kentucky). The company’s facilities in Hamilton, Ohio, can produce 10 million servings of produce per year using its high-tech proprietary technology. The company has invested USD 74 million to convert an existing 200,000 sq ft facility into its ninth vertical farm in Boone County, Kentucky. In June 2022, the company announced that it was building a new 200,000 sq ft farm in Covington, Georgia, which would be the largest and most productive farm (300x higher yield per sq ft compared to a traditional farm) in its network once it becomes operational from early 2023. The company’s production capacity would increase by 700% with the farms in Kentucky and Georgia. In September 2023, the company opened a USD 74 million vertical farming facility in, Kentucky.

Although greens still dominate product selection, the company also produces cherry tomatoes and baby cucumbers. The company said it would continue to search for new profitable crops that could be grown indoors (such as strawberries and hops) to expand the variety of existing crops. In October 2022, the company announced the launch of its vertically produced strawberry product “Strawberry Sparkles” at all Dorothy Lane market locations and select retail stores. In September 2023, the company introduced ready-to-eat salad kits, which will be available at more than 200 locations in Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

Key customers and partnerships

80 Acres Farms has signed an agreement with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station to conduct collaborative research to advance the science of vertical farming. The initial research project will cover the analysis of chemical components of greens produced by 80 Acres, and exploration to find new protocols for vertical farming. The research will also include the evaluation of different types of blackberries that can perform well in the vertical farming environment. In January 2023, Siemens and 80 Acres Farms partnered to optimize, automate, and control 80 Acres' farming facilities and processes and to industrialize and scale the proprietary Loop platform of 80 Acres Farms' technology subsidiary, Infinite Acres.

Funding and financials

In August 2021, the company raised USD 160 million in a Series B funding round led by General Atlantic to support market expansion and to further develop high-quality product offerings for existing and new markets.