Episode Summary

Join Harry Duran, host of Vertical Farming Podcast, as he welcomes to the show speaker, futurist and Chief Sustainability Officer at SweGreen, Sepehr Mousavi. Sepehr is a sustainability strategist, innovation catalyst and a passionate futurist with an international and multicultural background. His organization, SweGreen, is the number one AgTech company in Sweden and is revolutionizing the vertical farming industry by providing futuristic, smart and circular solutions for controlled-environment growing systems. In this episode, Harry and Sepehr discuss Sepehr’s unique background and vertical farming origin story. They delve deep into the concepts of symbiosis, smart real estate solutions and the importance of Research and Development. Finally, Sepehr speaks to the importance of educating the world on vertical farming and what excites him the most about the future of SweGreen and the AgTech industry.

Episode Sponsor

Ceres Greenhouse Solutions

Key Takeaways

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• 03:22 – Harry welcomes to the show Sepehr Mousavi, Chief Sustainability Officer and Founding partner at SweGreen, who discusses his background and roots, what brought him to Sweden and how he got involved in vertical farming and AgTech
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• 
  
• 11:38 – What Sepehr learned from his time at Plantagon, one of the early pioneers in AgTech
• 
  
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• 20:15 – Sepehr expounds on the concept of symbiosis
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• 24:18 – Sepehr talks about farming as a service
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• 30:47 – Sepehr expounds on SweGreen’s smart real estate solutions
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• 34:37 – The importance of Research and Development (R&D)
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• 36:41 – Sepehr speaks to why he identifies as a futurist, where he looks for inspiration and what excites him about the future of AgTech
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• 44:42 – The importance of educating consumers and those looking to enter a career in AgTech or vertical farming
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• 47:46 – Sepehr shares the SweGreen initiatives he’s most excited about
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• 53:11 – Harry thanks Sepehr for joining the show and let’s listeners know where they can connect with him 
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Tweetable Quotes

“If you’re going to scale down the innovation from a city function to something that could feed neighborhoods, then you could look at smart buildings and how you could build up symbiosis.” (21:09)

“The logistics of food is very difficult to handle.” (25:28)

“From the very beginning I was very interested in history. And what I learned from history is that if you look at the process of how we got here, you could speculate where we’re going to end up in the future because we always repeat these evolutionary trends.” (37:52)

“When I look at our farmers today, they are people in their twenties coming to work in their hoodies, listening to their hip-hop music, planning things on their iPad and then doing the practical work. And this is the future of our farmers.” (46:07)

“If you talk about how we conceive food as a concept that ends up in our shopping bags, people have got more used to technology solving the issue. So the reaction is ‘wow, this is really cool,’ rather than, ‘I’m a skeptic.’” (51:02)

Links Mentioned

SweGreen Website

Sepehr’s LinkedIn

Plantagon Website

Sepehr’s Blog

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Mentioned in this episode:

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get a sense into how unfunctional and

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a panic feeling in my head that the things that I'm working with are a

bit meaningless. I need to work with— build a better

future for the people. And that was the time that I decided that

I'm going to quit my job and go back to school and started learning more

about sustainability and green tech.

Welcome to the Vertical Farming Podcast, weekly conversations with

fascinating CEOs, Founders and agtech visionaries.

Join us every week as we dive deep into the world of vertical

farming with your host, Harry Duran.

Vertical Farming Podcast, Season 2. Welcome back. We are in the

home stretch here. It's been a fascinating, fascinating season with

so many interesting founders, CEOs, chief

strategy officers, sustainability officers, so many to

name. I wonder if you have a highlight from this season. I'd love

to hear about it. [email protected]. If

this is your first episode, then welcome, welcome. You're in the right place. This is

the show where we interview said fascinating CEOs and founders

of the leading vertical farming companies from around the world. Again,

I'm your host, Harry Duran. And in case you missed last week's episode,

we had a great conversation with the founder of Heron Farms,

Sam Norton. We learned about all things related to

indoor farming using saltwater-friendly crops. I

certainly learned a lot from that episode with Sam, so make sure you check that

out. Episode 25. This week I welcome

futurist and Chief Sustainability Officer at Swegreen, Seper Musabi.

Seper is a sustainability strategist— that's a mouthful—

innovation catalyst, and a passionate futurist with an international and

multicultural background. His organization, Swegreen, is the number one

agtech company in Sweden, revolutionizing the vertical farming industry by

providing futuristic, smart, and circular solutions for

controlled environment growing systems. In this episode, we cover Sepper's

unique background, his vertical farming origin story, and touch on

definitions of terms like symbiosis, smart real

estate solutions, and farming as a service. Sepper explains the

importance of Sweetgreen's research and development department,

and why he feels it's important to educate the world on vertical farming and those

looking to enter a career in agtech. The time flew by with this

conversation, and I really enjoyed Seppur's unique perspective on the

industry. If you enjoyed this episode or past episodes, I'd love it if you leave

a rating and review at ratethispodcast.com/vfp.

I'd love to read yours out next. Special thanks to our episode

sponsor, Ceres Greenhouse Solutions. If you're looking for a greenhouse

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This episode's also brought to you by the Vertical Farming Weekly Newsletter. Each week, our

team member Daniel Dre scours the ends of the earth to

find you the best stories in the world of vertical farming. Make sure

you sign up today at verticalfarmingweekly.com. Okay,

let's get into this conversation with Seper. So Seper Musavi, Chief

Sustainability Officer and founding partner at SweGreen, thank you for joining me

on the Vertical Farming Podcast. Thank you for the invitation. That's a pleasure

being with you. So Seper, we were having a brief chat

about the temperature in our respective areas. So

for the benefit of the listener, let people know where you're at. Where's home for

you now? Absolutely. I'm based in Stockholm, capital city of

Sweden in Scandinavia, and tonight we're going to have like

-12 degrees. It's snowing outside, so it's cold. Yeah.

Where were you originally from? I'm Iranian, so I'm like basically born in

Iran, but I grew up in different countries and have an international

background. But now I've been in Sweden for almost 10

years, so I could count myself as a Swede as well. What's

your fondest memory of growing up in Iran? I come

from a, you know, landowner family.

So basically, we had a lot of different farmlands on my father's side.

And for me, I mean, agriculture has been always close to my

heart. And these are like very good memories, like being

on the countryside and these huge farms of cotton and pistachio and

like, you know, having all those people working for my family. So

these are the positive ones. And then there's like a lot of mixed feelings about

the good and bad ones. So you've had

your hand in the soil, so to speak, since you were probably young. You could

say that. You could say that, definitely. I very much followed my

grandfather, who was owner of these farms. And my father was

academic and working as a university professor.

But my grandfather, he owned the farm and he had many farmers

working for him. And it was really fun hanging out with that guy

and getting your hands dirty and in the soil. Some meal or food you

miss most? There are actually like quite good local restaurants here.

You know, after the revolution in Iran, we have like a big

migrating community in different countries, including Sweden. But there

are this like, you know, slow-cooked food, like different

stews that you have like in the country, and then it's served with saffron

rice. So those smells always like transfer you

to your childhood. Yeah, definitely. Nothing like a—

I always ask people, and I'm wondering what your answer would be, when you

think of your childhood, what's a smell that comes to mind? No, I

mean, definitely that's one of those things because I guess smells are very—

they just, you know, push a button down there, like in your head and

like, you know, transfer you to the past, like very fast. But

for me, it's more or less like the smell of spring and the grass

that brings me back to my childhood very much. Yeah.

What then, what brought you to Sweden? Long story short, I mean, I

started my education in agriculture engineering and then I started

like moving around the world, like experiencing different countries. So I,

I've been in different countries like Switzerland, you know, in England,

Singapore, Dubai, and worked mostly like around food questions,

but very much focused on business side

of that. And then in my mid-20s, when I was

working for a big like food company and was

engaged mostly like on the marketing side and working a bit with corporate social

responsibility, I started to get a sense into

how unfunctional and unsustainable our world is and how

our resources are depleting, the growing population. So I

started getting a panic feeling in my head that the

things that I'm working with are a bit meaningless and need

to work with innovations and something that could build a better future for

the people. And that was the time that I decided that I'm going to quit

my job and go back to school and started learning more about

sustainability and green tech. And one of

the countries that I had on my map that I hadn't been to and didn't

explore, but I had a lot of good, you know, input on

being a country that is like has sustainability as a part of its

DNA, a lot of successful like tech companies. So

I decided that I would move to Sweden. So back in

2008, '09, I got like this feeling. In 2010,

I landed here in Sweden and started with a master's

program in agroecology. What was the biggest culture shock for you?

I have like a very international background, and I developed a skill for being

flexible. So it wasn't like that difficult for

me to digest down the Swedish culture, as many people talk about, like, oh,

Swedes are shy, you would not be that much socially

integrated, or the weather is so cold and so on. But it wasn't like that

much of a shock for me. I used to like live in different

countries and not to get shocked. So I don't think if I have

any like big shocks that I could tell you. That's interesting.

So it seems like obviously from growing up with agriculture in

your family's background for many generations, it just feels like this

was a path that was going to be part of your future. Did you

always know like growing up when you attended university that this is something that you

wanted to study? and learn more about? Absolutely not. I mean, I wasn't

thinking about like, I'm gonna end up there because all of this, like, you have

a lot of family pressure of becoming like an engineer or a medical

doctor, like in the Iranian family. Or a lawyer. Exactly, and

having like 3 PhDs and stuff like that. But when I

wanted to start like in university, I thought like adding tech to

agriculture would be really helpful because I saw like how difficult it is to

be a farmer. And, you know, like still it's so super difficult,

especially in developing countries for the current farmers. And we see like the

farming generation is becoming like older and older also in a lot of countries,

even like in the more industrialized countries like the US, for example.

And that was like the reason why I decided like I want to go and

study like agriculture engineering to be able to see like how

more automation you could bring to agriculture and make it a bit easier and

more like scaled. And when did this idea or

the promise of controlled environment

agriculture Vertical farming, like when did you start to become aware

of that? I mean, I started learning about controlled environment

farming being the greenhouse industry quite early, like learning, like,

because agriculture is all about like manipulation of ecosystem services. I

mean, many people say, you know, vertical farming is artificial and it's not

natural. The thing is agriculture in general is not natural. We're supposed to get

our food from nature as a part of our ecosystem services. And

food is ecosystem like service number 4, one of the main ones.

Aside from air and fresh water and, you know, things like that. But I mean,

manipulation of your setting for better yield and production and less

risky business is controlled environment agriculture. And I

mean, greenhouse industry was easy for me, but I learned that greenhouse

industry hasn't been that much developed since the

Industrial Revolution and then the Green Revolution

afterwards in the '60s and '70s. But I mean, back in

2012, I started reading Dickson

Despommiers' book on vertical farming. So Dickson like many, many

other ones has been an inspiration to me when I learned about

that. And then for me, I mean, I was doing my

master's project on 5 different innovations that could

help us surviving on this planet. And I focused

on 5 different company showcases in different areas, like, okay,

energy and hydrogen power, for example, was one of them. Mobility and

electrical cars was one of them. So I tried like to reach out to

Tesla and talk to Elon Musk, for example. I couldn't like talk to him

directly. as you might think.

But I managed to talk to his brother that is working today in vertical

farming, for example. And yeah, that's the other, uh, Musk.

Exactly, the other Musk. And then I talked to

founder and CEO of Plantagon in Stockholm that was

working with vertical farming as well. And that was like my first

contact with people working in the industry and trying to build it

up. And that idea of growing vertical in

real environment amazed me so much that one day I

showed up like at their door and say like, I'm gonna work here from tomorrow.

So that's how I got into the industry basically.

And what does— for the, for the benefit of the listener, what did Plantagon focus

on? What was their specialization? Plantagon was one of the early

pioneers in the industry that started back in 2008 and

officially became like an actor in 2010, I guess, before

I joined. I joined it in And the

idea for Plantagon was an automated

system in very large scale that you would have a

mechanical helix system that you could actually like

plant your seeds on top of it and then you place it

inside in a skyscraper and the plant just

moves down and becomes like ripe and ready to be harvested in the bottom floor.

So you have these skyscrapers in different cities that could feed

the whole city or like, you know, meets the need of leafy greens and

herbs for them. So that was the basic idea for the company.

But I mean, it was like a very big vision and Plantagon was very much

focused on the mechanical engineering and the robotics part of that.

And unfortunately, like back in 2019, early

2019, it went bankrupt. I mean, we could go to it and

like talk a bit more, but that's the intro to the company. It

seems like this concept of the skyscraper, it's

because it seems like a lot of what Dickson was talking about in the vertical

farming book, right? Because that was the vision, like he thought early days,

this is, you know, take advantage of these buildings and these spaces.

And it seems like that might have been an idea that Plantagon was leaning towards.

How high did Plantagon think these buildings were going to be? Yeah, I mean,

that was very interesting because Dickson was one of the advisory board members of

Plantagon as well. It was a Swedish innovator who came up with the

system that you could, you could develop, and the building was tall. So the proof

of concept project as a pilot was in a

skyscraper in city of Linköping, just south of Stockholm here,

in a 17-story building. So I mean,

tall for a vertical farm. And then

obviously that you mentioned that they went bankrupt. If you had to look

back now and think about, you know, What aspects

of that they got right, and then what aspects maybe,

you know, were not working so well? What do you think the

answer for that is? I mean, basically, I guess there is a fat chance in

different industries that the first flavors fail because you always come up

with this, like, you know, perfect vision and you want to, like, realize a vision

that is too early. So you want to, like, eat up an elephant as a

piece instead of, like, chopping it down to different pieces and eat it up.

As many actors are doing it at the, at the moment. So one

thing was like the vision was gigantic, it was too big. And the

other thing was like Plantagon was a bit ahead of its time. We don't

have that much emergency need for leafy greens. I mean, it's a

working industry. It's a futuristic thing to think about, like in a

skyscraper feeding our people at the moment. So that

part was the other one. And then the proof of concept project was too expensive,

so it was really difficult to obtain that much risk capital for

the company. The other thing that was also tricky was Plantagon

got used to having money in the bank account because

of the big seed money that the company received in the very beginning.

So it became like a budget-oriented company instead of

a goal-oriented company, and let's go and get this like drops of

financing that you might need. So I mean, for me, I've seen an

impact innovation who could have been a part of the future and like,

you know, taking it to the next level fail, and I learned a lot

like from that. And I mean, maybe the, the wrong customer

because Plantagon was very much focused on selling vertical farming to cities,

and maybe cities are not the right customer for buying vertical farming. They

could only enable you with the platform. Yeah, I think when you think of

cities, you think of bureaucratic red tape and time.

Exactly. Yeah. So I mean, I had the chance of like meeting a lot of,

uh, interesting people during my Plantagon time, likes of

Dixon, uh, Peter Diamandis, like mentioned Plantagon. Abundance. I

met him, Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, you know, people like that.

And then working with like, you know, the political side of that and

educative part of that, which was like super fun for, for a young

guy like me to be engaged on that platform, is getting a lot of like

also rewards from the people listening to these visionary ideas. But

in the end, I mean, it was a failure for a good innovation like

that. So it was a sad story in the end. Yeah, I've mentioned it a

couple of times, the influence of Peter Diamandis's book Abundance. which

had the chapter on future technologies. That's literally how this podcast got

started because I read it and then there was a chapter on the

future nanotechnology, vertical farming. And I was like, oh, vertical farming,

interesting. He mentioned Dixon's book, obviously. So I

did, he has committed to coming on for season

1 and then I have to revisit because we sort of, we

weren't able to make the scheduling happen. But I mean, that's obviously, that would be

a fun conversation and to bring everybody in. Peter is a very nice guy.

And I mean, he's been in Stockholm and also like, uh, Steve Cutler, He's been

to Plantagon's office and like met with us and like mentioned Plantagon in Abundance

as well. So that would be nice to listen to those guys now and see

like how that kind of like that chapter could be rewritten now

based on the thing happening at the moment. So once the

Plantagon had folded, you know, you were left to

decide where you wanted to go next. And I'm sure you had some different

options. So talk a little bit about before Sweetgreen, like where you

ended up? It was early 2019, like in February. And

I mean, for, for a few months, there were like rumors that

it might happen. I mean, there has been a very big discussion with a big

Swedish actor, which owns a lot of Swedish corporates

here in Sweden, becoming Plantagon's major owner and buying the

company. There had been thoughts of like having a billion offer on the

table for Plantagon. Plantagon had a very big patent

portfolio for this skyscraper, which had a lot of intellectual

property value based on the valuation of consultancy

firms that put that together and so on. But from a billion

Swedish crowns offer to bankruptcy, it only went like super

fast in a few months. And for me, it was

also like a conflict between the people in the competence team and

people leading the company as well, because the focus went on the

portfolio. And obviously the portfolio was about the mechanics and

robotics and automation, and we been thinking like the digital

revolution is actually a better way of taking, like

making it smart rather than automated would be maybe interesting

for us to take as a path, especially like working with Swedish tech

companies that were acting like closer towards

the data science. So when Plantagon went bankrupt, one

idea was like, all right, you could go and continue somewhere else. And I was

engaged already as a smart city consultant with many different like

companies in our network. But anyways, the core part of our

competence team, the people who worked with R&D

and growing competencies, sustainability and innovation

people, we decided that it's too good to go. I

mean, we need to help this innovation to survive and maybe like with

a change of vision that we should focus more like

towards digitalization and a small-scale thing that might work here

in Stockholm rather than being sold to Hong Kong and Singapore and

Shanghai, because the system for Plantagon was in very big scale,

like, you know, big tons of food for being delivered to

people in China, for example. So we got

actually like a very nice conversation on with some angel

investors who already invested also like in a smaller

project at Plantagon. We talked to those guys and also a few like new people.

So it was 5 of us who decided that we go together and these

angel investors put more money into the company to build up a proof of

concept. For this small-scale innovation. And then

Sugreen was born after a few months after the

bankruptcy of Plantagon back in early 2019 as well,

like in March, April. So we officially became a company in

April, May. And the first thing that we did was

we tried to like capitalize on all the competence that we had in our head

and build up a proof of concept for a super

controlled environment farm that could have had

a symbiosis model with its host building,

exchange of heat and, you know, surplus energy coming from

the LEDs, bringing in CO2 from the building and so on, which is

to date still very unique. Where was the,

uh, inspiration for that idea? Did

you see somewhere else where that was working, or—

I'm just curious where you thought of the concept of the

symbiosis, which I think is fascinating. If you could talk about that. This was a

part that was developed when you start talking about, you know,

integration of vertical farming as a smart city function.

And a smart city is all about like building an industrial

symbiosis on the infrastructure level. If you talk about

the hardware of the city, how would your mobility connect to

your waste management and to your energy system? So you

You get like waste management, collect it, turn it to energy, give it to your,

like, you know, buses, for example. And that

inspired the thought that you could have like a symbiotic

system that has an exchange between different infrastructure at

city level. But if you're going to scale down the

innovation from a city function to something

that could feed neighborhood, then probably you could look at like smart

buildings and how you could build up symbiosis between host tower

that we have our farm under, for example, which is the old newspaper tower,

one of the tallest buildings of Stockholm. And we have a farm on

floor -3, like one of the old newspaper archives.

And then what are the different resources that we could exchange? And many

of us, we know, like, we talk a lot about sustainability of vertical farms

in many different manners, except like the energy consumption and

the LEDs, because we know like the LEDs are still having that much

evolved, and there is a lot of, like, loss of energy,

which is also costly, that you could try to

harness and sell to a host facility. And that was the thing

that we showcased. So one part was the symbiosis, and the other

part was, like, trying to build a proof of concept for disruptive

innovation of, like, 100% controlled environment for

growth of food. Before digging in a little bit more on Sweetgreen, I

saw that you also did some work at the United Nations. as well.

Yes, I mean, that's— these were kind of like the different, you know,

sidekicks that came like when I was working for Pentagon, because

it was a lot of like lobby work and working with political parties,

setting up standards for smart cities. So I, I worked with the

United Nations as a climate change advisor in one of their task

forces for a few years, and then I got like a bit disappointed because

this like heavy machinery is not as functional as I hoped

it would be. Then I was chairing like a few like

standardization committees at national and international level as well. So there

has been a lot of engagements like that for me as a Chief

Sustainability Officer for that company. I think what's

interesting and maybe frustrating is the reach

of some of an organization like the United Nations in getting the

word out is really important. And also, yeah, probably making

connections to other countries and getting all these systems to work

together because obviously You know, their mandates are to

increase sustainability efforts for the planet

and everything that the United Nations does is global in scope.

So it must have been frustrating because the potential is there, but

sometimes because it's an organization so big, they move so slow.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's one of the things like it's more or less like

as an example of working for a big corporation and a startup because you could

work in agile settings, you could like try to reflect on everyday

things and try to just change a strategy very fast. But if you're working with

a corporation that you have like 10 vice presidents

over you and you need to talk to a board and so on, you can't

be as agile. So this is exactly like the same thing when you

work with the bigger organizations and United Nations is gigantic. So,

but I mean, the goodwill is there are tools that are there, but it's not

as functional that you hope. So it's very sluggish. You get used to this.

Tampa, maybe you could be there and work. But unfortunately for me, it was

difficult because I was a bit more used to being like working with

more impact within reach. One of the things you talk about on

the Sweetgreen site is this idea of farming as a service. Can you talk a

little bit about that? Sure, absolutely. I mean, when we build up this proof of

concept farm, we started to realize like, all right, I mean,

it's very interesting. There are like different areas, it's interdisciplinary

system that you put together. You talk about like, okay, you want to produce

food in controlled environment, in the city environment. So that's already like

complicated. But then when you come to production level, that's in it. It's again

like more systems getting integrated to each other. It's the plant

science and agricultural knowledge that it's about the plants itself.

You talk about like all the physics and dynamics, all the machinery that you

need for the climate to be controlled and the optimized climate. You

have all of the IoT and connectivity platform in order to be able

to measure if everything is right or not. And then you come like to to,

to the data sciences, use of AI, like for your recipes to see like

if I have the perfect recipe for, you know, Basilica Genovese

to be produced within my system, or like good tasting

tomatoes based on this customer requirements and so on.

So when we started to work like further with that, we realized like

the logistics of food is very

difficult to handle. And one thing is like you have

this competition with the traditional food industry that is

built on like buying product in a bulk sense, and then

you have all the middlehand who come in. So when you look at the

leafy green business, you see like this huge

billions of dollars worth of industry that goes to

leafy greens and herbs and salads and likes of those, like vegetables and greens

basically. But only 20% of that figure

goes back to production. And then you start to think about like, it's a

challenge to sell your produce, especially in the last mile. So we started

to think about like, what could be an alternative

solution to resolve 2 different points. First,

resolve the last mile issue and put these farms like

as close to the customers with zero transport. And also

how to get paid beforehand instead of,

you know, selling your produce to the customer. Because I mean, all of these

different like competitors that we have that are focusing in large scale, I mean,

from the big actors like Plenty to the smaller ones,

you haven't sold your plant until the customer has

paid for it in the cashier. Yeah. But then this in-store

platform that we developed, and we sell it in a farming as a service

model, you get paid beforehand, and it's as close like to

the system as well. And for you to understand like what's an

in-store platform mean, it is basically like a

smaller module that we have developed in an automated setting, like a

fully integrated solution which is automated. It's

remotely monitored and AI-driven. So you put in a small

farm in your retail store. How small? How— what size

are we talking about? I mean, the area that we need is more or less

like somewhat between 30 to 40 square

meters. That makes a store totally self-sufficient

for all the salads and leafy greens and herbs that they

consume. If it's a bigger store, then you could go like bigger, but we are

also looking at like maybe a— on a smaller like

module that could be also like put in the smaller like retail stores as

well. But at the moment, we need an area of like 8 by

5 square meters, something like that with a ceiling of around 3 meters

high. And do you have these functional now? We do. I mean,

we have put the first one as a proof of concept in a

supermarket in Gothenburg in west coast of Sweden. So that was

the first one. And then like the second one in city of Linköping, south

of Stockholm, and now we have signed more contracts and we have a lot of

hot leads in Sweden in our pipeline. So hopefully by the

end of the year, we should have around like 20 of them in

the market and then maybe like taking the international step.

And do you have enough data points yet to see what the response has been?

Exactly. So I mean, these are the different parts that we started like to

work with because, okay, the first module we focused on like developing a

controller for the system based on the intelligence that we captured in the

R&D farm in Stockholm. So we called the project

CityFarm. And CityFarm in the beginning was supposed to

deliver food to the people, but then it became like, all right, we sell the

produce as a side thing, but it's rather an R&D unit

to capture the intelligence to be used in these different farming as a service

units that we have out there. So yes, so we started

like with capturing that intelligence and feeding it to the farm.

And there is a sensing platform and connectivity platform to capture the

data from the real-life environment and from our customers

to try to build up a rather more autonomous system. Because

the next step would be if our— what we call it like

3Green cloud system would become more and

more AI-based and automated and autonomous rather, which

could get connected to the business intelligence of the retail store.

and produce after demand. So these are like the next small things

that we try to just, you know, hack and develop

towards them. But anyways, like the basic controller and the

AI center is in place for the units. And do you

have enough learnings from that to understand where you're looking

to innovate next? Exactly. I mean, the thing is like, we need probably more

units in the real environment to be able to decide on some of the

factors because we still have like some strategies that we

have around analytics, how they should work, how much we should

further automate these units, how much like work could

we save, what kind of like after-sales service we should

offer, like in a rather practical sense, and then look into

applied use of AI and multi-AI agents rather to

build up autonomous systems. So these are the different areas that

we decided that should be our focus, but we don't

have like crystal clear idea of how it should be

developed. So we have a short-term kind of like practical

strategy for developing our cloud system and farm

management system. But those bigger questions about

like traceability and autonomous functions, they would come as

you capture more data from the real-life environment, basically.

When you talk about the offerings for Sweetgreen and the different

places you're looking to innovate, you know, you talk about smart farming, your

smart Would this fall under what you call your smart real estate solutions on the

site? No, we don't. I mean, the smart real estate solution was one of

the early, like, kind of like concepts that we developed that maybe

our customers could be the real estate branch, basically, because

they're looking for innovations. I mean, use of, you know, buildings has

changed. There are many different things that are changing in these, like, for example,

parking and garage houses, they're becoming less popular,

especially in like Central European cities, because people

tend to not own a car, but look at like mobility as a service, for

example, and use like shared cars. And then obviously you

don't need like big garage houses and what should they do with that?

So then the idea of like, you know, what do you call it? Like the

co-spacing, like for offices started, that

shared office became a thing. It boomed in Stockholm. Like everybody

started offering, like we have like a, you know, hotel office for

you that you could get like share the space and so on. And then it

became like like over the need that the market has.

And then, I mean, they give you like offers and you understand that, all right,

okay, there's like so many different coworking spaces

in cities like Stockholm, Amsterdam, London. And then COVID.

Exactly. And then the COVID came and everybody works from home and so on. So

these guys, they're looking for these different innovations. Our

webpage is unfortunately not very updated. So we still have

that offer on our webpage. We are launching actually new version during

next week or the upcoming one. Yeah. I don't think if we're gonna keep like

this smart building offer there because we're focusing rather on

farming as a service. That was also one thing that we learned, that we should

focus on one part of our innovation rather than

talking about the smart buildings and farming as a service at the same time.

But anyways, like the smart building offer was rather

to build up farms like the City Farm facility that we have here

for the real estate owners that have bigger spaces that they don't know what they

should do with them. But anyways, then the business model question

always like falls on your lap and you need to sell the greens and then,

you know, resolve the last mile issue as well. Yeah, I think it's

fascinating, you know, the concept of what you were thinking with that

because it's the same thing as when people talk about unused space on

rooftops, right? And that's how a lot of these, you know, outdoor farms

got started. I grew up in New York, and so there's a lot of

farms in Brooklyn as well that started on rooftops of these

unused space. And so I think to think of that is not any stretch of

the imagination because we don't have to look too far in some of these

urban areas to see so much space that could be put to use

for some of these efforts. And I mean, one good thing about this kind of

unused spaces is you could build up these symbiotic manners because having

rooftop systems when you're If the rooftop is not built for agriculture, it

could have its own difficulties as well. So people who've worked with

rooftop farming and not like in the community sense, rather than like

these green islands that you could put on top of like any tall building,

you know that there's a lot of different challenges running these. And you

always have like also interference of the weather

outside, the sunshine, it's not that much control.

Then you have like all of these issues. And it's very different. Difficult to build

up this kind of symbiosis with the residential building when you

don't have like a professional administration in

place because people tend to, you know, lose their

interest in being a farmer. It could be like super fun to have

like a rooftop farm in your residential building and you could be there,

but if it's like a daily work that you need to perform, then you lose

your interest after some time and then like the whole thing kind of of like,

you know, vanishes away. How important is your

R&D arm to ideas you have for future growth?

It's very important. I mean, one thing that I could say is like my

early role in Sugaring was basically like Chief

Innovation Officer, that I should be a part of like developing the innovation. But

as we went on, we brought in like new people and made

them kind of area responsible person for these

5 different areas that I mentioned. For like the physical

platform that we have and the machinery and plant sciences and the

connectivity platform and the digital system to have

like product owners for these parts. And then I

took the role of research lead and the sustainability guy to

orchestrate more or less like these parts in

collaboration with our academic partners, because we have a lot of

good contacts, especially with Swedish universities and some other like

European research institutes who are interested in indoor

vertical farming as an industry, and especially like seeing the

relationship of that towards the people, like the

social sustainability angle and the environmental sustainability

angle. And they like to look at us as, you know,

R&D infrastructure. And for us, I mean, it's interesting

whenever we could match our needs with their

competencies and also like seek different grants projects together.

Which also has been a part of our obtaining money and bringing

like capital on board and also competence, especially from

academia, in a sense that is good for our business in order to

be able to keep the company for ourselves

until we could have a better growth and then maybe like go for

institutional money and bringing like venture capital money

on board because we had a very good like seed. seed money, and then we

sold like some minor shares to different like

serial entrepreneurs and people who are working like with the

risk money and so on. So it's very important for us to

have a close collaboration with the academia and focus on our

R&D platform. One of the titles that I've noticed on your LinkedIn was futurist

as well. I'm wondering how you think about

what's possible because you have the benefit of having worked at Plantagon

and seeing how the promise of something, could you— could

attempt it and then not succeed. Yeah. So I'm sure that's always in the back

of your mind, especially at Sweetgreen, you know, trying not to get too far ahead

between what's possible and, you know, what you see in the future

and what's realistic in terms of what you can deliver. Exactly. So that's one of

the things that we discuss very much like internally, because one of our

co-funding partners has become our CEO in the later stage,

and that guy is very much like goal-focused, and Andreas is always the

one that puts up the handbrake for me. Like, don't get too

visionary with the stuff that you're thinking now. We need to focus on this and

that, and then you could go to the next step. Because I'm always curious about,

like, oh, what about this traceability function that we could add to this platform? And

what about this autonomous function that we could have here? Maybe we could look

at hyperspectral camera image processing. And

he always says, like, maybe take it easy, start with this and that, and

then take it to the next one. And I've been like that from the very

beginning. I was very interested in history. And what I learned from

history was like, if you look at the process of development of

how we got here, you could somehow guess where are we

going to like end up in the future as well. Because we always like repeat

this kind of like evolution trends. And like sometimes we tend to

forget like how did we end up here? And you could could see like, okay,

we had a pandemic around 100 years ago and we have a pandemic again.

And it's more or less like, okay, it's the first time that it happened to

us. But so, and that's because like, so instead of like being

obsessed with that, I started to learn about these different trends

that you could foresee about future. And that's why like I tend

to see myself as someone who's interested in building the future.

And more or less, this is what kept me in this industry because I

think vertical farming is a part of the future of food.

Even if many people talk about like, okay, food security and leafy

greens don't really like add up because you can't feed the people

with only like greens. But I know, I mean, we're gonna be

surprised by different varieties that we might be, you

know, able to produce in vertical farms. And especially if we're gonna like, you

know, take ourselves into different planets, vertical

farming and resource-efficient like farming is the future. So you

always see like a bigger kind of like journey for our kind

rather than only focusing on what's happening today and what's

needed today. Because I mean, it's going to be for the better good in the

future. Yeah. And I think a futurist doesn't limit

themselves by what's come before because you have

to have the capacity to think of something that doesn't exist. Exactly.

Because that's how you create the future. Because if you just use what was around,

we would never have these new technologies because sometimes people's mind is

so limited and If you look at just the pioneers

in the space and you look at, if Ford, the quote

from Ford, like Henry Ford, he said, if I ask people what they want, they

probably would've said a faster horse. Yeah, exactly.

Not a car, right? So I think it's this idea of thinking beyond

what's possible. Are you a fan of science fiction and

future movies or? Oh, definitely. I

have a small blog on Instagram that I actually

write about futurism and science fiction. It's called Earth

of Billions. And one of the things that I wrote about was this kind

of like the crisis that London's gonna have with all the horse dung in

its streets. And it's gonna be like filled with horse dung, like up to

people's knee if we continue with a growing population. And then after

30 years, you have the cars like all over the place. Not that, I mean,

the cars did come with their own challenges and traffic and pollution and

stuff like that as well. But that's how we are. I mean, somebody thinks outside

the box. And we need to take it. And people who don't like

adapt to these scenarios, they vanish away from the picture. And usually like

people who don't want to get out of their comfort zone and are afraid of

going to the unknown and have like a torch and look in the dark,

they're not the one building the future. But we always have like

signs of what the future could be if we see the need and we

try to think outside the box and like take the future as like you

know, amazing people do it like every day around this planet for

having a better future for our kind, like give us a chance of

survival, basically. Where do you look for inspiration?

In many different platforms. I mean, I follow like

work of many different influencers in the sectors, people who

I see as pioneers in different industries. And

I have like different areas that I'm more like fond of, but

not specifically like idolizing someone or reading like

in a specific one, but I try to do my, you know, desk

research, follow like different people and also like

see what's happening in the industry and what's coming like from the

top-down visionary kind of like ideas, because

it's somewhat like a hemisphere of like these

2 things meeting up from a top-down vision

to a bottom-up like innovation and development that

many smaller like actors could do as well. And build up a

piece of the puzzle for this future scenario. When you think

of the future of controlled environment

agriculture, vertical farming, what's something that you

think might be interesting to dig into or to learn more

about when you think about maybe, you know, 3 to 5 years down the line?

I mean, what I see that might be like a very interesting topic, and many

still like talk about, that is capitalizing the potential of the Because

we know that the potential that we capitalize on is not that

much, especially in the traditional farming. So

that's one thing that is— we are focusing very much on that. And

then the other thing is how much of resource efficiency or

further resource efficiency, and especially like circular and circular

economy systems we could have in the future. How much of like

reuse of these resources, because we have a planet we've got to take care of.

Depleting resources. And the climate change is not per se

working in favor of us with water scarcity and lack of

like arable land and fertile soil and the pollutions and all

of these different issues. So I see a very big

potential for controlled environment, and especially like in vertical settings,

because then you could bring it closer to the people in more like

intensive sense, and then having like higher yield based on

less resources that you put into that. But one thing that I

see that is very interesting is maybe role of actors

such as like operators and telecom actors, which

might become like very more important in an industry like food.

Because I mean, you see them already like as a big actor in many other

industries like mobility, for example, like how they

help the autonomous vehicles to receive like environmental

information Yeah. And, for example, get the

infrastructure connected. So you're not working as a

self-standing unit, you're becoming a part of a bigger system.

And this is something that those kinds of actors could have for the

food industry, especially like connecting people

to the decision-making processes, like for the production

units. And what is it that actually people want to have, and then,

you know, engaging the cities decisions a bit more into this platform

and like maybe uprooting the need for middlehand actors

in the sector as well. So there are like a lot of interesting things that

might happen in the future. Not that AI should decide what I'm having for dinner,

but an enabler role for a better

and more aware decision-making process for the, for the consumer.

And also like, as I mentioned, for the production unit based on more

systemic and holistic thinking. How much or how

important do you think is education as well,

both from the consumer and also from the people coming into the

space and the opportunities that might exist as people think about this as a

career choice as well? No, I mean, it's really

important. I mean, for me myself, I got this shock

after getting a bit more educated on how actually our planet

works today. And then you get shocked like, wow, is this really like that

bad? And what's my role as an individual? I mean, you could always like

panic and like go to your shell and say like, okay, I'm not a part

of that and I'm not going to be here like when basically shit hits the

fan. But on the other side, it's more or less like then

as individuals we could make more aware decisions and become a

part of the solution. And when you talk about like inspiration for the

people, I mean, as I mentioned in the beginning, there are so many older

generation who are engaged as farmers today in the

industry. And many of the youngsters and their children, they didn't

want to stay on the countryside and continue, even if it was

like industrial, like farming systems and so on. And then

I've heard figures about like this old generation of farmers in the

Far East and in Japan that it's over like 70 years with

the average age of like people being like feeding the country.

And then if you don't have this new generation coming and working for it's a

challenge. But I mean, when I look at our farmers today, it's like,

they're like people in their 20s, like coming to their work in their hoodies, listening

to their hip-hop music, you know, planning things on their iPad, and then

doing the practical work as well. And these are like the future urban

farmers. So I guess it's really important, like, to add this

coolness factor to agriculture, and vertical farming has a very

big role for that. How do you think about this when it comes to

your own family and just teaching them? Like, I imagine they're

inspired by the work that you do, and, and then your friends and family as

well. No, I mean, one thing that I could tell you is like a more

plant-based diet became a more accepted like

choice for my family as well, especially like coming from a

country that you have a lot of like, you know, meat dishes and people love

like their barbecues and like having their kebabs and And, you know, things like that.

But then you talk about like a plant-based diet in, in the beginning,

it might be a shock to talk about like oat milk

and almond milk and like changing towards more like vegetarian

alternatives. I try to eat myself rather than as a

pescatarian. So I eat a lot of seafood as well. Me too. Yeah.

Which, yeah, but I mean, that's the thing, like you could inspire the

environment around you and then make people aware that, I mean,

their choice matters anyways. This could be like in many

different areas, including food, and food is specifically

important because we know that 30% of our carbon

footprint is associated with food and everything that comes

with it as a package, like the whole industrial processing and

transportation and logistics and so on. So it's really important.

As you think about what you have planned at SweGreen,

what excites you the most about the initiatives you're currently working on right now?

Basically, I think like we had found a very good niche

that is more or less globally unique because the whole process of

growing the plant for us happens in the store.

And there is no other actor that still like offers a similar

solution that you have in that sense. And the amount of yield

that we have based on the footprint area that we have is also like

quite high. And I see like a lot of these different

challenges could be resolved. And this innovative business model that we

developed for farming as a service to get paid on, on a subscription fee

is also very interesting and more unique. So all of these,

and like making it a more accepted thing by retail, because

that was a disruption of the traditional food system, some things

that the retailers weren't used to. They're used to buy something and

pay it with a margin. To the end consumer instead of thinking like, oh,

I could pay a subscription fee like Netflix and

then I could make good money on top of that and it's good for my

sustainability image, or like core sustainability if you really care

about that. Some, like some actors basically do. So

we have this collaboration with the biggest retailer in Scandinavia,

Ica, which became our early adopter customer, and all of the

ones that we have like signed contracts are also coming from the same chain.

So all of that is excitement. And I think the next step

for us is rather to go over this

like practical research and development, and especially development that

we're doing at this stage to make this like last

touches on the innovation and make it more and more practical and

user-friendly, especially for scaling up, like

offering a better like, you know, interface to our customers, better like

planning tool to our customers that are— we are like focusing on,

and then go to this more like visionary parts when we

land more venture capital also. So that would be like the next

thing for us to build up organization and take it to the next level

and become an international actor. Because I mean, as a very young

actor who only have been like in the market for less than 2

years, we have been really agile, and that's thanks to the competition that we

had on board, like millions of dollars that was used on

other platforms for development that ended up in our brains

when we started new ones and didn't cost us anything, especially

time, which is very important, like in, um, in the startup

environment. So the next uplifting stage would be

really exciting to be a part of, like, uh, if you're talking about

Sugoi. What was the, the reaction? Because when you look at these units in the

store, I mean, it's really interesting because it's It is this sort of

hybridization of— because you've got the people who can create these

in-house appliances, like you're just a private residence and you want to have something

like underneath the sink, and then obviously all the way up to the, like, the

Plenties of the world. But it seems like you've found a sweet spot to try

out a model, and there must be an instant reaction when people are in a

store to see these units. Yeah. And to, like, you know, I'm wondering

if you've been there and seen that feedback. No, I mean, basically it's really interesting

because, I mean, if you talk about, like, how we conceived

food as a concept that ends up in our shopping bags sometimes. I

mean, especially like earlier stage when I was working like

for Plantagon, you always got this question like, what, this

sounds like unnatural, it's artificial, like why are you

using this much technology when you have the sun outside there?

But I mean, now people have got more used to technology

solving the issue, so it's rather like, wow, wow, this is

so cool. Rather than I'm a skeptic. And

this is really cool to see, like even people who

come from this hipster background that are not

that much like tech interested are even like interested in this.

And this is like so enjoyable to see, like people actually understand like how

you could delegate your problems to technology

and get something like in return that tastes better, is more

fresh, have like a better like sustainability, and it's all about like

education as well. You need to present this idea to them. Why

are we doing that? How are we doing that? What's in it for

you? What's in it for me? What's in it for our planet? And then people

get on board. So this is quite interesting to see the reaction of

people when you bring it to that level and talk to them like in

real environment, like only taste it. Like the one that was imported from

south of Europe and has been traveling on trucks and trains

like for weeks. Compared to the one that is like here and

has been like grown in there and it's still like living. So you're taking

it home and you're not throwing away any soil. It's

soil-free. You're not throwing away any nutrition. Everything

is circular. All the like the surplus energy is used in

this building. The cooling energy comes from like the fridge

like over there. And then people like said, wow, this is so cool. I mean,

I'm actually doing something for the for the planet, and I'm

bringing better food home to my children, especially if they're thinking

about like the future generation. Fascinating, fascinating stuff. And I,

every time I have these conversations, just learn a little bit more. And

yeah, I want to thank you for taking the time to be here.

Um, you know, the time goes by quick. And what I find so fascinating

is your origin story. And I don't know if you knew it when you were

growing up as a child that this is where you would end up. Up. But

it's— the story now is, is so nice when you look back how,

you know, generations of farmers coming from your family

and you combining your interest of technology and your passion

for, you know, the future, you're able to put all these pieces together now.

And you learned some hard lessons at Plantagon, and now

you're translating that into making better choices at Sweetgreen.

So it's been fascinating story you shared with us. I want to

thank you for taking the time. No, thank you. It's been an amazing

journey. And I was lucky enough, I mean, to be able to

experience this. And like, as you said, like coming from that background, and

then sharing the things that I'm doing with, with my parents, like

with, with like the previous generations and having the chance of like

working with amazing people, like the people that I had around me and

have around me. And I mean, give me the environment to grow in,

like, you know, day by day and be able to work with a

question like related to our survival on this planet and the

future of food. So I'm really thankful for that. And thank you

in specifics, like for the invitation and letting me being a part of this

show amongst like many other interesting peoples and pioneers in

the industry. Thank you. So the website is

swegreen.com, S-W-E-G-R-E-E-N.com.

And where else do you want to send folks anywhere else to connect with you

or the company? We have like Instagram as well, and if they look

for, uh, SuiGreen, they find us at Instagram as well.

And if they're interested in my futurism blog, that's

Earth of Billion that I have on Instagram as well. I'm always like

happy to be in contact on LinkedIn as well. And if you want to

follow our SuiGreen page on LinkedIn, then we share a lot of like

input and updates on the company on our LinkedIn page as well. So

feel free to follow us and be in contact with me as well. Okay, Sepehr,

we'll put all of those links in the show notes as well so people can

follow where they want. Thanks again for your time. I really appreciate you sharing the

story. Thank you. Thanks again to Sepehr for coming on the show

and sharing his story. As always, full show notes available at

verticalfarmingpodcast.com. Special thanks to our sponsor, Ceres Greenhouse

Solutions. Ceres creates sustainable growing environments by combining

smart design, innovative technology, and dynamic partnerships.

Learn more at ceresgs.com. That's

ceresgs.com. So this wraps

up season 2 of our podcast. Special thanks

to everyone that joined me this season. As I mentioned at

the top of the episode, I learned a lot from the conversations I

had. And as a little bit of a sneak peek, I'm really

excited to let you know that we are lining up season

3 of the podcast. Early shout out to the team at

Cultivated who's come on board as a season 3 sponsor. I already

have several interviews in the can, so I'll tease out a couple.

Eric Levesque from Cultivated, Allison Kopp from Artemis, Rob

Lang from Farm.One, just to name a few. So we're going

to take a little bit of a pause for about 2 weeks on this

podcast. I may release an update or recap

next week if I can get around to it, but make

sure to use this time to catch up on past episodes

and so that you'll be all caught up as we kick off season 3. As

always, don't forget to engage on all of our social platforms. We've been pretty

active on our LinkedIn company page and on

Instagram and Twitter @VerticalFarmPod. And that would be it. Now,

this may be also a good time to leave a rating and a review at

ratethispodcast.com/vfp if you enjoyed any of the content from this season.

Until we meet again for season 3, here's to your health.

Thanks for listening. To read the full show notes for this episode, which

includes any links mentioned in the episode, as well as a full show transcription,

visit verticalfarmingpodcast.com. There, you can

sign up for our email list to be notified when new episodes

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