Shownotes
Ever wondered how cutting-edge technology is revolutionizing indoor farming? I've got the inside scoop on the latest innovations that are changing the game. In this episode of the Vertical Farming Podcast, host Harry Duran sits down with Per Lysaa, CTO and co-founder of Elevate Farms and founder of Intravision Group AS. With over two decades of experience in photobiology and LED technology, Per brings a wealth of knowledge to the conversation about controlled environment agriculture.
Per shares his journey from architecture to pioneering LED applications in plant growth, discussing the development of Elevate Farms' patented gravity flow system. This innovative approach allows for highly automated, large-scale production of leafy greens at commodity pricing, potentially disrupting traditional farming methods.
The conversation delves into the challenges of scaling vertical farming operations, the importance of partnerships in innovation, and the potential for machine learning and AI to further advance the industry. Per also touches on the global water crisis and its implications for future food production, highlighting the critical role vertical farming could play in addressing these challenges.
If you're curious about the future of food production and how technology is shaping sustainable agriculture, this episode is a must-listen. Tune in to gain insights from one of the industry's leading innovators and discover the potential of vertical farming to address global food security challenges.
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Key Takeaways
5:22 Early Work with LEDs and Photobiology
10:09 Space Research and Plant Growth
15:52 Cannabis Research and LED Advancements
20:29 Founding Elevate and Business Strategy
25:21 Balancing Roles in Two Companies
Tweetable Quotes
"Plants have light receptors. So they are able to detect from far red through red, green, blue, up to the UV. And whenever they detect, the combination of spectrum and intensity sets off a chemical process in the plant that directly controls morphology and what we call primary and secondary metabolite processes."
"I read Peter Drucker, the guy who invented management theory and quality management, and he said that the purpose of a business is the creation of customers. It's not about shareholder value or maximizing return on investment, it's about creation of customers."
"We are facing a global water crisis which will greatly impact and disrupt how we make food on this planet. And 2030 and onwards, it's going to look bad. Countries in Asia, Africa, parts of Europe, parts of North America are really badly positioned."
Resources Mentioned
Website - https://www.elevate.farm/ & https://www.intravisiongroup.com/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/per-aage-lysaa-9685592/
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Mentioned in this episode:
2025 Precision Ag Report by iGrowNews
2025 Precision Ag Report by iGrowNews
Indoor AgCon 2025
Transcripts
$680 million poured into precision ag last year.
Speaker:Autonomous weeding robots dominated, and John Deere made 2 acquisitions in 3
Speaker:months. A food company, not an equipment maker, bought a
Speaker:robotics startup to protect its own supply chain. The deals are
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Speaker:available. Get your copy today at
Speaker:igrownews.com/precision. So basically
Speaker:the primary processes are growing and
Speaker:biomass and stuff like that, while the secondary is more the
Speaker:protection towards stress or environment or lack of
Speaker:water. And some of these molecules the plant will
Speaker:then produce, we experience as tastes
Speaker:Or medicine content, for example. Mm-hmm. So it's a very
Speaker:fascinating world for us when we started getting these tools.
Speaker:And then the story of course is then tech transfer at the chambers. We made
Speaker:our own research chamber around 2015. We built a
Speaker:cannabis research facility or room at least
Speaker:at one of the licensed producers in Canada.
Speaker:Welcome to the Vertical Farming Podcast. Weekly conversations
Speaker:with fascinating CEOs, founders, and agtech
Speaker:visionaries. Join us every week as we dive deep into the
Speaker:world of vertical farming with your host, Harry
Speaker:Duran. Vertical Farming Podcast, Season
Speaker:11. Regular listeners to the show, welcome back. I always roll
Speaker:out the red carpet or the green carpet for you, depending on
Speaker:your preference. I'm appreciative of all the work you do
Speaker:to share The love to share the
Speaker:episodes, to forward social posts, everything that you do
Speaker:to support the show, I greatly appreciate it. Keep on doing it. It's really how
Speaker:we spread the word. And if this is your first time listening, I'm positive you're
Speaker:in the right place. This is the show where we interview fascinating CEOs and
Speaker:founders of the leading vertical farming companies from around the world. I'm your host, Hari
Speaker:Duran, podcasting since 2014 with my first show,
Speaker:Podcast Junkies. I'm the founder of FullCast, our full-service,
Speaker:done-for-you podcast agency. And also newly
Speaker:appointed CEO of the AgTech Media Group. In case you missed
Speaker:it, we had an announcement on LinkedIn. My partnership with Seper Ashard
Speaker:of iGrow News has now come to fruition, and thanks to the
Speaker:team at Harvest Returns, we've raised a small seed round to get some
Speaker:progress going on the site. So we've got a lot of great things in store
Speaker:for 2025, so please head on over to
Speaker:igrow.news Or igrownews.com for all
Speaker:your CEA news. In case you missed last
Speaker:episode, I spoke to Simon Wordle. He's the CEO of Good Drop,
Speaker:and in this fantastic episode, he brought a unique
Speaker:perspective to vertical farming. He talked about his background in design
Speaker:and a vision for sustainable cotton, of all things. It's the first time we've
Speaker:mentioned that crop on this podcast. As the
Speaker:leader of GoodDrop, he's spearheading an initiative to grow cotton in these
Speaker:controlled environments, and he's transforming the textile industry. I
Speaker:love this idea of a closed-loop system for cotton production, and it's something
Speaker:really thinking out of the box that I really love and appreciate.
Speaker:We talk about their ambitious plans for this closed-loop system, and he shares his
Speaker:insights on their progress from container-based experiments to plans for a pilot
Speaker:facility, all while tackling the challenges of reinventing the
Speaker:cotton supply chain. Make sure you listen to that inspiring episode if you haven't done
Speaker:so already. This week I speak to Per Alisa. He's the
Speaker:CTO and co-founder of Elevate Farms and the CEO of Intravision Group. His journey
Speaker:from architect to innovator and CEA is truly inspiring, and his
Speaker:work with LED systems and plant growth has led to groundbreaking developments in
Speaker:vertical farming and plant-based pharmaceuticals.
Speaker:I was fascinated to learn about Per's experiences working with space research
Speaker:institutes and his contributions to understanding plant growth. in low
Speaker:atmospheric pressure environments. And we delve into the evolution of LED
Speaker:technology and its impact on plant cultivation, as well as the innovative
Speaker:gravity flow system used by Elevate Farms. Lots to cover in this
Speaker:episode, so make sure you've got a place to take your notes or just follow
Speaker:up with verticalfarmingpodcast.com to read
Speaker:everything we've listed, the show notes, the resources there as well. I have one ask
Speaker:for you. If you are enjoying this episode, past episodes, future
Speaker:episodes, Please share this with a friend. I know I make this
Speaker:ask every single episode, but it's really important. It's really the best way to
Speaker:share the podcast and all the things that we're doing here in this
Speaker:space. So next time you're speaking to someone, one of your peers, one of
Speaker:your friends in this EA space, mention one of the
Speaker:episodes that caught your fancy, and I would truly, truly appreciate it.
Speaker:These episodes are chock-full of great takeaways. You can always visit verticalformingpodcast.com
Speaker:to read the full show notes for each episode, which includes all guest links as
Speaker:well. Okay, enough about me, more about Pear. But
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Speaker:Vegas in 2025. So, Paralisa, CTO and co-founder of Elevate
Speaker:Farms and CEO of Intervision Group, thank you so much for joining me on
Speaker:the Vertical Farming Podcast. Thank you. This is such a global
Speaker:show because of the nature of CEA, so I always like to start these conversations
Speaker:with letting the listener and the viewer know where in the world you're calling from
Speaker:and And probably evening for you now. Sure it is actually.
Speaker:Yes, I'm in Oslo, Norway right now.
Speaker:Yeah. Were you born and raised there? I was not born in Oslo, but I
Speaker:grew up on the west coast of Norway, which is the fjord country, which is
Speaker:kind of famous as a tourist destination. Yeah. Do you get a lot of people
Speaker:visiting or having to take people to all the famous
Speaker:places that tourists like to see? Yeah, I mean, especially the
Speaker:west coast and also the northern part is kind of very touristy, I would say.
Speaker:And we have a lot of cruise ships coming in the summer. Winter tourism
Speaker:have really grown the last decade, I would say. Northern
Speaker:Lights and all that stuff, obviously. And also, I
Speaker:mean, Oslo have really become quite a nice city the last 2
Speaker:decades, I would say. We spent the oil money on something, so
Speaker:it's quite, quite a nice spot now. So we'll
Speaker:get into the work you're doing with Elevate Farms, which is relevant to this show.
Speaker:But prior to that, you've been working at Introvision. So for people
Speaker:to give a little bit of background as to what Introvision is and how it
Speaker:ties into the work you're doing at Elevate, can you talk a little bit about
Speaker:your background and how that got started? I can do that. And
Speaker:basically I'm running Introvision and Elevate are being run in
Speaker:parallel. So Introvision being Elevate's tech
Speaker:supplier and science partner, basically. So
Speaker:Elevate is more a large-scale farm operation.
Speaker:So more similar to what you would expect, yeah, plenty of our aero farms to
Speaker:do in that space. I can start. Yeah. So I'm actually
Speaker:by education, I'm an architect. Okay.
Speaker:And back when I graduated in '91, there was a
Speaker:finance crisis and I started actually a few years prior
Speaker:to work on a marine research institute,
Speaker:anything from shipbuilding, fast ferries, and fish and aquaculture.
Speaker:So when I graduated, I got my first job in this research
Speaker:institute and I ended up being there for 7 years. And
Speaker:afterwards, I was basically hired to innovate, to
Speaker:make new stuff. That turns out I had a kind of a
Speaker:talent for applied physics and innovation and making
Speaker:things. So I guess that's my push. And so I
Speaker:never, I normally say I never had a real job.
Speaker:Because after 7 years in that research institute, I was not an
Speaker:engineer and I was not an architect anymore. Yeah. So
Speaker:basically started Intervision then back in '98
Speaker:as a consequence of all these things. And quite early on
Speaker:around '99, we secured an exclusive on, on
Speaker:what was back then a Norwegian tech company making
Speaker:colored light tubes. So red, blue, green. color
Speaker:light tubes, which had longevity. So
Speaker:50,000 hours or use hours,
Speaker:and we could computer control them so we could dim the light and mix and
Speaker:make spectrum combinations. And I took this into 2 directions.
Speaker:One was photobiology. Mm-hmm. So we
Speaker:started research projects both on fish in aquaculture, how
Speaker:to control the light-induced
Speaker:hormones, so melatonin. which again controls the rhythm.
Speaker:So when typically in aquaculture you want to have
Speaker:fish juveniles maybe 4 times a year, so we kept the fish
Speaker:in dark rooms and simulated the seasons so that they would
Speaker:spawn at different points. And then more importantly, on
Speaker:the on-growing phase, we wanted to keep them in an
Speaker:eternal spring. So to avoid sexual
Speaker:maturation at all using light. And these things actually work.
Speaker:And then in parallel, we started with plants, with the microalgae.
Speaker:So we built the photobioreactors to grow algae, and there
Speaker:were a few commercial endpoints we chased, but it
Speaker:was anything from astaxanthin, the red color in the salmon, which is
Speaker:a feed component. We did green algae for live feed
Speaker:processes for fish, and then also we chased a sun protection agent,
Speaker:which were active in the UVA and blue light range. Range
Speaker:where people get the skin cancer. So I spent a decade on that.
Speaker:And then gradually from 2003 and onwards, we teamed up
Speaker:with a Dutch or a Philips-owned company in Holland.
Speaker:And we switched from light tubes to LEDs. So
Speaker:I would say we are one of the early pioneers when it comes to kind
Speaker:of photobiology and LED light. And then
Speaker:gradually for since 2003, so more than 21 years now, we worked
Speaker:with LEDs in various kind of plant, yeah,
Speaker:plant relations. So that was— There for a second,
Speaker:what were you seeing at the time? You know, because you're working in a lot
Speaker:of like the marine space in terms of like all the things you were
Speaker:mentioning previously. When did you start to see, or were you always aware of what
Speaker:was happening in the controlled environment space as it relates to
Speaker:growing produce indoors? Is that something you were aware of at the
Speaker:time, or did you start to become more aware of it as you started to
Speaker:enter that space? That happened later
Speaker:when we started. So, so I should mention though, the second avenue I followed with
Speaker:lights where we basically, we made large art
Speaker:installations. Okay. So we had a
Speaker:completely different use where we made computer-controlled
Speaker:art installations and actually made money on that back in the day.
Speaker:Anything from subway stations to bank headquarters and also
Speaker:public projects in especially Norway. We exhibited at
Speaker:the Shanghai Biennale in 2006. So
Speaker:we had these kind of 2 very different things from
Speaker:a perception point of view, but technologically they were almost the same.
Speaker:So we basically used the same tech and computer control systems in
Speaker:2 very different ways. In 2003, when we started with
Speaker:LEDs, we started working with turf grass. And
Speaker:that was the first kind of land-based plant thing I touched.
Speaker:We basically did the research in UK and in with Penn
Speaker:State University. So we had 2 different research
Speaker:avenues. The idea was to grow natural turf on football
Speaker:fields and on golf greens. So
Speaker:I did test and pilot a bit with some of the
Speaker:US Open clubs and Augusta and We also had a
Speaker:system at Green Bay Packers in Wisconsin. Okay. That was a fun
Speaker:one because this was not done just light, it was an environment,
Speaker:a controlled environment. So we used the heat from the LEDs
Speaker:to control the climate just in the microclimate, 10,
Speaker:4 inches above the turf. And the guys from Green Bay
Speaker:Packers said that they put the system out before Christmas and it started snowing.
Speaker:And when they came back after New Year, there was a rabbit family living
Speaker:under this Really nice, 20
Speaker:Celsius. That's funny. Warm and with
Speaker:food growing there. So that was kind of a fun little story.
Speaker:What was your experience of visiting the States and especially the Midwest
Speaker:weather-wise? It's probably similar cuz I live in Minnesota, which is right
Speaker:next door to Wisconsin. So, and there's a lot of Scandinavians that
Speaker:live here that have migrated here many, probably decades
Speaker:ago. Yeah. So there's a very Scandinavian influence here.
Speaker:40-some states and probably spent 2 years in America. I also
Speaker:lived a year in Chicago as an exchange student back in the day,
Speaker:in the early '80s. Wow. So no, I have a very kind of
Speaker:nice relationship to America and then, and also Canada, obviously.
Speaker:Basically that was the starting point. And then around 2008,
Speaker:'09, we got funding for something called a Eurostar project,
Speaker:which is a European research program. Okay. And
Speaker:that was together with a, um, company in Iceland called Orf
Speaker:Genetics. They used the GMO barley
Speaker:to produce human proteins, so cytokines in
Speaker:the seeds of the barley. So, mm-hmm. And
Speaker:typically their customers would be a medicinal research project, stem
Speaker:cell, where you needed one isolated human protein to do some kind of
Speaker:research. And so, you started then kind of
Speaker:venturing into this area of plant-made pharmaceuticals.
Speaker:That's kind of the label on this thing. And to make it very short,
Speaker:you can use a lot of different plants as long as they have a, the
Speaker:same kind of DNA structure as a human diploid. And then you can
Speaker:make big protein molecules. So there is a lot of research
Speaker:being done on cancer drugs and there's a lot on vaccines.
Speaker:So the first time I guess this was successfully demonstrated that
Speaker:scale was after the, oh, sorry, I forgot the name. Was it
Speaker:the Ebola outbreak in Africa? 8, 9 years back?
Speaker:The Western aid workers that came back to Europe and America were saved
Speaker:using a tobacco infiltration system
Speaker:where you use transgenic tobacco plants and use them as a factory
Speaker:to grow the drug, basically. So the reason why we ventured into
Speaker:this space was that LEDs were still very expensive. Yeah.
Speaker:When I started with LEDs in 2003, 2004, I would only
Speaker:get like 4 lumen per watt of light output on a
Speaker:blue LED. So that was 2003, 2004. In
Speaker:2014, I got 40 lumen on the same energy.
Speaker:And the 2003 LED cost me $8,
Speaker:while by '14 it was $1, and then by
Speaker:1920 it was 40 cents. Wow. And light input
Speaker:have increased again. So over the intervention kind of
Speaker:journey here has been very much about tech maturity,
Speaker:and we were early, but we were also lucky in the sense that
Speaker:we managed to be part of or initiate a
Speaker:relatively large string of research projects. So we started
Speaker:making research equipment and sold that to different kind of
Speaker:institutions, mainly towards universities, but we also started supplying.
Speaker:space research institutes in North America and also the
Speaker:European Space Agency. So we found a very
Speaker:small niche. Okay. Where we could learn
Speaker:and develop basically. So through that project in Iceland,
Speaker:I used a Norwegian space research group to develop a remote control
Speaker:system. The workers in Iceland only were kind of
Speaker:greenhouse workers. There were no scientists. So I used
Speaker:to know a group, they remotely controlled from their office a unit at the
Speaker:International Space Station. That was kind of the trigger for me. It was this
Speaker:very cool remote control thing they had. So
Speaker:I joined in and we developed this remote control for the system in Iceland.
Speaker:And then I asked them, so who is the leading environment
Speaker:or group in the world when it comes to making plans for
Speaker:human space travel? So a base on the moon
Speaker:or Mars. And that pointed me to the University of Guelph and Professor
Speaker:Mike Dixon there. So the short story
Speaker:is that Dixon was a postdoc at NASA in Kennedy
Speaker:where I used to do all these things. He managed to get
Speaker:funding from the Canadian Space Agency to build his
Speaker:institute at the University of Guelph. That was around,
Speaker:must have been around 2005. 6-ish around
Speaker:there. So when the whole institute was built to answer one big
Speaker:question, is it possible to grow Earth
Speaker:plants in a low atmospheric pressure? So
Speaker:imagine you are on Mars, it's a small planet, 1/3
Speaker:of gravitational field versus the Earth. And the
Speaker:question was, are the plants able to do the gas balance? Can they
Speaker:still catch the CO2? And do this whole
Speaker:photosynthesis process. So the
Speaker:Guelph facility has a unique chamber setup with, they call
Speaker:it hyperbaric research chambers. So they are vacuum chambers
Speaker:and you can then take it down and mimic the
Speaker:gravitational field on the moon or on Mars, for example, and then test
Speaker:how this works. And the really nice thing for me was that when
Speaker:I started putting LEDs into these chambers and you close the door on a
Speaker:vacuum chamber. You need really high-fidelity instrumentation to
Speaker:understand what happens inside and camera setups and all that stuff. Obviously, you
Speaker:cannot open the door, so you need the sensor
Speaker:systems to work. And everything is like an isolated
Speaker:universe, no outside things affecting
Speaker:what's happening inside the box. So when we dial up more blue
Speaker:light, within 2 minutes we could actually see how that
Speaker:affected the gas balance, if the plants would consume more CO2
Speaker:release moisture or oxygen, for example. So
Speaker:it gave us a very precise understanding on how
Speaker:plants interact with their environment, and that's kind of been
Speaker:key for both the intervention and Elevate and on how we
Speaker:afterwards then design the commercial systems. Was there anything as
Speaker:you were going through those and doing those experiments, was there anything about that process
Speaker:that was like surprising to you at the time, or, you know,
Speaker:You obviously need a high degree of instrumentation and calibration to
Speaker:measure things at that level. So, you know, maybe looking back it makes sense,
Speaker:but I'm wondering, as you were going through that experience at the time, if there
Speaker:was anything that was really surprising for you. I wouldn't say it was
Speaker:really surprising, but it was a very kind of happy moment when I understood
Speaker:what we could do with these things and how we could evolve by
Speaker:putting in more advanced LED systems.
Speaker:So we then started making very efficient,
Speaker:high-intensity, and multispectrum LED systems for the different chambers they have.
Speaker:So back around 2012, '13, we had a
Speaker:lamp with 5 times the intensity of the sun, half a meter
Speaker:inside the chamber, and 7 different colors. So orange,
Speaker:purple, red, blue, green. We could use not to kind
Speaker:of grow plants at 10,000 micromoles, which of course doesn't make any
Speaker:sense. The sunlight is 2,000 micromoles for reference. Okay. But we could
Speaker:use it to mix different spectrums and start to learn more
Speaker:about how does the plant respond to this. And basically,
Speaker:I guess the key element here is that plants have light receptors,
Speaker:so they are able to detect from far red through red, green,
Speaker:blue, up to, or to the UV. And whenever
Speaker:they detect the combination of spectrum and intensity,
Speaker:it sets off a chemical process in the plant that directly controls
Speaker:morphology and what we call primary secondary metabolite
Speaker:processes. To give you the short story, so
Speaker:in nature there is this tobacco plant called Nicotiana
Speaker:bettameana who lives in a symbiosis with an
Speaker:Agrobacteria. Mm-hmm. And in nature, that Agrobacteria will
Speaker:insert itself into the roots of this tobacco plant. and
Speaker:force the plant to produce a certain protein DNA.
Speaker:The GMO part is that they've GMO'd this symbiosis to
Speaker:happen in the leaf structure. As opposed to the root structure? Yes.
Speaker:Because then, so it's in the leaf biomass. So the way you do it
Speaker:is you grow this plant for roughly 4 weeks. You have a, I don't know,
Speaker:18-inch tall tobacco plant, something like that. You then
Speaker:invert that plant upside down inside a vacuum chamber.
Speaker:Suck out the air, dip the whole thing into a water
Speaker:solution where you have the Agrobacterium with the
Speaker:DNA for the protein you want to make, and then you release
Speaker:vacuum and everything is sucked into the leaf.
Speaker:And while you grow the tobacco plant afterwards for
Speaker:roughly a week, the bacteria forces the plant to
Speaker:produce the drug or vaccine. So basically a big protein molecule.
Speaker:And there is a few companies in North America and Canada doing
Speaker:this. So, and it's a low cost to make
Speaker:drugs versus doing the big bioreactor systems, for example.
Speaker:So the idea that I've been working on is to, so back in the day,
Speaker:platform, we're working with Biosimil Herceptin, which is a breast
Speaker:cancer drug women have to take after operation. But
Speaker:the cost point of that for one patient is roughly $35,000 a
Speaker:year. So that excludes the big
Speaker:portions of the world, right? And this, this approach was
Speaker:the roughly 10% of the cost on the production
Speaker:part. So the idea was to do this more less developed
Speaker:countries or less wealthy countries, basically. So,
Speaker:but yeah, so that, that was kind of, so in order to do that, I
Speaker:needed to vacuum infiltrate tons of biomass every day.
Speaker:Um, so, and I needed to make a grow box, we call it, the one
Speaker:we grow the plants in. And I needed one which I can invert. So
Speaker:then we realized we had to actually grow the whole plant from seed in that
Speaker:box. Yeah. And that was the starting point. The
Speaker:next thing we had to do was to come up with a, a grow system,
Speaker:and that became the system we patented and which Elevate is using.
Speaker:We name it the Gravity Flow. Okay. So basically
Speaker:the Gravity Flow Imagine it's a very long rack, almost like a tunnel,
Speaker:and it has a lift on one side feeding in the grow boxes,
Speaker:and then they just roll down through the system on gravity,
Speaker:and we extract them on the other side when the plants are ready for harvest.
Speaker:Mm-hmm. So it's a relatively highly automated
Speaker:system, and then we have very advanced light
Speaker:and air control inside that tunnel, so we always
Speaker:control The temperature and yeah, humidity
Speaker:and the light spectrum and everything. And we also track everything with RFID,
Speaker:so we always know where each box is in the system.
Speaker:So right now we don't actually have anybody working inside the grow rooms.
Speaker:It's all automated. Yeah, it's all automated inside the grow room. Only
Speaker:maintenance and sanitation and stuff like that, obviously.
Speaker:So all the workers are working on the start, so there's the seeding and
Speaker:getting that stuff, monitoring the transplant.
Speaker:What were your thoughts as you were starting
Speaker:Elevate? Did you want to sort of prove this use case out, or did you
Speaker:feel that you then had the opportunity to begin because of this
Speaker:patented system and the innovative way in which you were growing? There was a new
Speaker:opportunity to grow additional types of crops using this
Speaker:method. Yeah, I would say it's a combo. We started around
Speaker:2014 to supply LED lights to vertical
Speaker:farming, and we teamed up with a company called Elevate, which was a company that
Speaker:was a few kind of companies. So we worked a lot with ZipGrow, which used
Speaker:to be, I guess, Bright Agriculture, which then became Plenty.
Speaker:So we're an early, I would say, supplier into this industry. And we
Speaker:worked with a lot of the, what became brand names. But the challenge
Speaker:was that all the clients, none of them actually had any
Speaker:IP, so they couldn't really scale.
Speaker:Mm-hmm. So, and then since I'm an architect,
Speaker:read a lot of stuff because obviously I don't know anything about almost most
Speaker:things. I read Peter Drucker, the guy who invented the
Speaker:management theory on quality management. And he said that
Speaker:the purpose of a business is the creation of customers.
Speaker:It's not about shareholder value or maximizing return on
Speaker:investment. It's about creation of customers. So I decided,
Speaker:well, if I can't find a big customer, I have to create one.
Speaker:And obviously working with all these vertical farms, I met a lot of people. And
Speaker:then when I met my co-founder in LA. Amin Jadabi,
Speaker:I thought, let's give this one a chance and see. So we
Speaker:put the IP into what became Elevate for leafy greens.
Speaker:Amin used to run a paper tissue business. So when he was
Speaker:still in his 20s, he and a cousin, I think, took over the family business
Speaker:and ran that for 15 years and sold it. And their clients was
Speaker:the US food service industry. companies like
Speaker:US Foods, Sysco, the big ones, big distributors here.
Speaker:Yeah. Yeah. I looked into the numbers and each of them make
Speaker:something like 9 times the food we consume in Norway. So
Speaker:it's hard to really imagine the scale, right? We're only 5 million people here.
Speaker:So anyway, so the idea we went for was then to do
Speaker:large quantities, high quality at commodity scale
Speaker:or commodity pricing. So not super expensive micro or
Speaker:baby greens for a niche market, but try to kind of
Speaker:get the big volume. And we are able to do that.
Speaker:But of course, as anything else, there's a lot of challenges on
Speaker:actually getting that to roll. And one of the things we discovered, we built this
Speaker:elevate facility in Orange, New Jersey,
Speaker:and we are able to do almost 200 kilos a square meter a year.
Speaker:Which is two three times what the competition can do. We really
Speaker:have high yield, but still it's a small facility.
Speaker:So in order to serve these big industry players,
Speaker:you need to have some impact. You need to replace
Speaker:trucks going from Salinas or from
Speaker:Arizona. You can't give them five pallets; it has to be five trucks
Speaker:or something. And that's still in the works. We are looking at
Speaker:sites in. Pennsylvania or something big.
Speaker:And hopefully we'll get there soon. What's been the
Speaker:biggest shift for you? Because like you said, you come from an architecture
Speaker:background. Obviously you have a mind for
Speaker:tackling engineering tasks. When you had to make the shift into
Speaker:business mindset, marketing mindset, you know, all the things
Speaker:that Peter Drucker talks about, right? And just figuring out like, what's
Speaker:the market for this? Obviously partnering with someone who had experience in manufacturing was
Speaker:helpful. How much of a challenge was that for you to kind of make that
Speaker:shift in your mindset into realizing that you needed— what
Speaker:got you here won't get you there is the saying, right? So, you know, you
Speaker:had to change your way of thinking. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I do
Speaker:consider myself being very privileged or lucky in a way.
Speaker:I mean, I've spent probably 2 years in Asia making stuff. I've
Speaker:spent 2 years in North America. Canada selling and installing
Speaker:stuff. And of course a lot in Europe and the Middle East. So
Speaker:basically all the tasks I have to do is
Speaker:a necessity to move things forward. I get my kind
Speaker:of happiness or kick out of making stuff. So normally
Speaker:when I did big art installations, I would say that there was 3 moments of
Speaker:profound happiness. It was when I got the idea,
Speaker:when I managed to sell it. And then 2 and a half years
Speaker:later when I could see it actually in action.
Speaker:And it's a little bit the same with these systems we grow for plants because
Speaker:there is a lot of hard work and stuff you have to go through.
Speaker:And it's a lot of small and big crisis you need to manage to
Speaker:get there. Yeah. And you need to deal with people, obviously. And I enjoy
Speaker:people. I mean, this would not have worked if I didn't do that and I
Speaker:would say most of my best friends are kind of the researchers
Speaker:and the people I have in the companies we work with.
Speaker:I'm a workaholic. There's no way of denying that.
Speaker:Speaking of being a workaholic, you have your hands in 2 different businesses. Having a
Speaker:hand in one is a challenge for most CEOs. So how do you
Speaker:manage or how do you figure out the time you need to spend
Speaker:on Intervision versus the time you spend on Elevate? I'm curious
Speaker:about that because there's probably CEOs that are trying to wear
Speaker:multiple hats also that are listening, and I'm curious what your approach is. Yeah, I'm
Speaker:only the CEO of Intervision. I'm not at Innovate. I'm functioning, I would say, more
Speaker:like a CTO there. Which is still a big task.
Speaker:Yeah, it's a big task, but I make the tech in one company and we
Speaker:use it in the other one. So in my experience,
Speaker:most of the good ideas or good innovation we come up with are
Speaker:direct responses to some kind of need or challenge
Speaker:in kind of the, in either production or a customer need.
Speaker:We spend a lot of time and energy on trying to kind of
Speaker:optimize the finished product for a specific task, optimize
Speaker:the process of how to make it. And we have the
Speaker:luxury that we basically go all the way. We try to control everything from the
Speaker:grow plug or the media or What it is basically
Speaker:to the way it's kind of harvested and packaged in the other end.
Speaker:So that's where we do a lot. We have a very good 15-year almost
Speaker:relation with the University of Guelph. I think right now we have 9
Speaker:students from PhD, master's to undergrads working on
Speaker:different types of plants for us. And we cover anything
Speaker:from food to animal fodder to medicinal plants. So it's
Speaker:quite a range. Most of the biological research
Speaker:we do support will probably never end up in a product,
Speaker:but they are all kind of very important on the learning. And then we have
Speaker:quite a few future candidates, which we do believe will
Speaker:end up as kind of products in some sense. And that's what I do for
Speaker:Elevate as well, right? I try to optimize the products and understand exactly how
Speaker:we can do the tech towards a certain scale of a
Speaker:market or Yeah, whatever it is, basically. What's a tough
Speaker:question you've had to ask yourself recently?
Speaker:Tough question I have to ask myself. I'm not sure. I should
Speaker:probably spend more time on that, I guess is the correct answer.
Speaker:No, but it's, I'm getting older and yeah, it's building something when you
Speaker:start with one person and you do this organic and
Speaker:also because I control too many parts of the
Speaker:process. It's always challenging because in the starting
Speaker:point, of course, you are the driving force behind everything. But if
Speaker:you continue being that, you cannot grow. You need
Speaker:to let go. You need to trust people. You need to, yeah. So
Speaker:that's probably where I'm failing the most, I would say. I just spend too much
Speaker:time on it or I don't understand how to get more people quickly
Speaker:up to kind of a high level. And then you, of course, you burn your
Speaker:fingers sometimes because you give people responsibilities. responsibility and they don't deliver.
Speaker:But I'm sure I could improve a lot on that. But we have really
Speaker:good people though. And then, so I'm really proud of the team we have now.
Speaker:And it's very multinational and it's quite young
Speaker:and it's very diversified. Where are you seeing
Speaker:the most innovation happening in the controlled environment space?
Speaker:That's a good question. I mean, if you look at the LEDs, the light
Speaker:sources, all the stuff we use there, it's kind of It's started
Speaker:to become very mature. Yeah. I would say that I
Speaker:expect the major innovation to happen on the control sides,
Speaker:especially on the machine learning using cameras,
Speaker:and then towards more advanced AIs. I'm
Speaker:certain that's going to be a rapid development in the next 5 to
Speaker:10 years. If I had the money, I could probably come up with 10
Speaker:areas where we could really use a camera-based machine
Speaker:learning today and then a more advanced AI in
Speaker:3 years' time or something. But of course, again, I mean, everybody,
Speaker:every industry wants the same things, right? So there is
Speaker:limited resources on good software people as well.
Speaker:So that's competition there, but we are working our own processes to get
Speaker:there. And it's about having a core team
Speaker:in-house and partnering with the right groups. I think we have very
Speaker:much a partnering structure. We partner with anything from universities
Speaker:to tech suppliers. Yeah, we don't try to do everything.
Speaker:That's impressive. On the Elevate Farms side, who
Speaker:is an ideal partner or a client for
Speaker:you? Where are you looking to develop relationships there?
Speaker:So we focused on Central Europe and Switzerland, in
Speaker:Switzerland basically, and on East
Speaker:Coast USA. That's kind of the 2 focus areas we have right now.
Speaker:And in both regions, we are aiming to build something big,
Speaker:4 or 5 million kilos a year
Speaker:type operations. And we need to get there to have some
Speaker:impact. But again, we are also resource
Speaker:limited, both on people and funds. So, I mean, we've been
Speaker:invited to a lot of projects in the Middle East. Yeah. And none of
Speaker:them have kind of matured to anything or
Speaker:substance yet. But obviously that's a big area to
Speaker:expand. If you look a little bit more into like
Speaker:the 10-year perspective, we studied a lot on kind of available water
Speaker:resources for food production. Yeah. And the projection is
Speaker:that around 2030, we have this from a
Speaker:publication in, in Nature, for example, we are facing a global
Speaker:water crisis, which greatly will impact and disrupt
Speaker:how we make food on this planet.
Speaker:Mm-hmm. And 2030 and onwards, it's going to look bad. And countries
Speaker:like Asia, Africa, parts of Europe,
Speaker:parts of North America are really
Speaker:badly positioned. And of course, as it always is, sadly,
Speaker:the rich countries will always manage to buy feed,
Speaker:right? So it's the poor people who don't get So I do
Speaker:see that, I mean, we have in the research pipeline for the next 10 years,
Speaker:we have a 10-year pipeline. Yeah. We do stuff like
Speaker:mint oil, for example. And the reason is
Speaker:that mint oil is used as a food taste additive, but it's used in
Speaker:Colgate toothpaste, it's used in chewing gum, everything basically.
Speaker:But the mint plant, which used to be grown a lot in America, has a
Speaker:fungus or virus in its roots. which contaminates the
Speaker:soil you grow it in, and then you cannot continue growing it.
Speaker:So I think between Colgate and a few other big ones that
Speaker:consume olivewood grown in North America, they don't really last
Speaker:220 farms or something. Wow. So
Speaker:they moved, I saw, to Southeast Asia, so Vietnam, China,
Speaker:Sri Lanka, but that's not going to be sustainable. Yeah.
Speaker:And of course, It's a very easy crop to move to an
Speaker:indoor system at scale. It's a relatively
Speaker:low height crop, so you can stack it in multi-layers, for example.
Speaker:So we are doing the research now. So at some point, I believe we will
Speaker:build really large systems to do that at scale
Speaker:because they will have to make more food, more rice, more staple foods
Speaker:in Asia to support the growing population. It sounds
Speaker:like there's definitely a lot of opportunities there. What are you seeing? What's your
Speaker:perspective on your colleagues that are in the indoor
Speaker:farming space? What I like to do towards the end of these conversations
Speaker:is almost like create an open forum. You know, I know there's always people
Speaker:that are worried about protecting all their IP and
Speaker:keeping everything housed, but, you know, there has been some conversations about
Speaker:trying to find a way to collaborate. And, you know, that could look differently for
Speaker:different companies. working on different projects, but I'm curious if you have any
Speaker:thoughts or for the CEA space, for your colleagues in
Speaker:this space to foster that collaboration. That's a good
Speaker:question. We have, yeah, it is, as you said, so that there is a kind
Speaker:of certain element of competition. Yeah. Which of course would make
Speaker:that a bit tricky maybe to arrange. But
Speaker:in honesty though, I mean, food is so enormous
Speaker:and I don't know what vertical farming has managed to get to
Speaker:consume food in America, but if it's a 10th of a percent, I would be
Speaker:surprised. So reality, I guess, is
Speaker:that the disruption is happening regardless.
Speaker:When I started working with algae back in '98, '99, mm-hmm,
Speaker:we had 385 ppm of CO2 in the air,
Speaker:and this year I'm guessing it's around 416, 417.
Speaker:Pre-Industrial Revolution in UK, it was 180.
Speaker:So global warming is happening and there's no
Speaker:political ability or will to stop that. Yeah.
Speaker:It's just going to continue. You can just see the new shift now
Speaker:in America where oil and coal will kind of really be
Speaker:come back. And of course, China, Russia, I mean,
Speaker:name a big country. Yeah. And they're not able to do that.
Speaker:And I mean, you cannot expect the poor people not
Speaker:to eat. I mean, that's just reality. Yeah. So in
Speaker:order to kind of better the planet by 2050, I believe we need
Speaker:3 times more energy on the planet because you
Speaker:cannot lift people outta poverty without giving them access to
Speaker:the modern media. They need internet, they need platform to
Speaker:communicate, and they need to learn, right? Mm-hmm. So if you
Speaker:consider that only something like 15% of the energy we have today is
Speaker:sustainable, just imagine the shift you have to go if you have
Speaker:to make 3 times that energy in 30 years and it all
Speaker:has to be sustainable. Wow. It's an immense task. And then
Speaker:we have the water thing. So ideally we should all
Speaker:try to cooperate and share learnings. I, I think it's probably the
Speaker:proper thing to do. Yeah. For sure. I think that's the, the common
Speaker:thread that we hear in these conversations. There's enough work for
Speaker:everyone, and that's what they call it here, the all hands on deck moment.
Speaker:Like, we just need everyone moving forward towards this goal, and everyone's doing it in
Speaker:their own way. But I really want to thank you for taking the time, and
Speaker:I really appreciate your team reaching out and connecting us because it's hard for me
Speaker:to find everyone that's doing something in the CEA space, and especially
Speaker:what I consider you and the work you've been doing a pioneer in this space.
Speaker:You've been doing it for so long and you're innovating, creating IP. And I
Speaker:think I love the ability to tell these stories because I don't know that a
Speaker:lot of people may know the work that you're doing and the innovation
Speaker:that you're creating. So I really appreciate this conversation and I learned a lot
Speaker:and I think it's going to be helpful for our listeners as well. So I
Speaker:appreciate you sharing that, your insights today.
Speaker:Yeah. And thank you, Hari, for having me join. Yeah. So Where's the best place
Speaker:for people to, listeners to connect with you and to learn more about
Speaker:Elevate and Intervision? We have
Speaker:elevateandintervisiongroup.com and elevate.form websites where
Speaker:there are contact potentials, mail addresses and
Speaker:stuff like that. Okay. So, uh, and I think your, yeah, your team gave me
Speaker:those links, so we'll make sure we have those available for you as well. And
Speaker:we'll put those in the show notes. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Okay,
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