Leaves to Door

Food production and supply chains are highly susceptible to disturbances, most recently highlighted by the global COVID-19 crisis. This has led to immediate shortages in supermarkets as consumers bulk buy, alongside increased orders and pressure on food delivery services including those offered by highstreet retailers and 'recipe box' companies. As people seek to reduce their contact with others, more are moving to online ordering and less-frequent delivery services rather than shop in person. The requirement for extended shelf-life perishable goods such as salads and leafy vegetables is therefore clear. More worryingly, insufficient numbers of seasonal workers are available to harvest fresh produce due to cross-border movement restrictions and an insufficiently skilled national workforce, alongside the issues of physical distancing that this type of work raises. This may cause fresh crops to go unharvested and cause increased prices for produce that is harvested this year and highlights the issues that impact the post-BREXIT fresh produce sector.

This project draws inspiration from growing herbs and cress commonly seen on supermarket shelves. Growing plants are both convenient for the consumer and the supplier because the product shelf-life is substantially extended. By adapting conventional, easily sourced plant growth media, we will devise methods to efficiently produce baby leaf salads, spinach, chard and other leafy vegetables that are ready to eat but still growing at the point of sale. We will initially feed this into our direct-to-consumer sales requiring assessment and adaptation of food packaging then expand this to other suppliers in our business-to-business sales once the method is robust.

However, the plant isn't the whole story. Conventional agriculture requires a large number of people to plant, tend and ready crops for sale. We have been working to flip the model for agriculture and have developed smart plant production technologies. This technology reduces the environmental impact of growing and distributing food, locating production closer to demand centres as well as reducing hands-on time required to produce an equivalent product with less waste - all critical factors in the current crisis. To produce uncut, growing crops, we need to modify these systems so that the growth media is not damaged during production processes and can be packaged and delivered to a consumer's home or to a retailer. As both a produce and technology company, we already market our current technology and we will be able to offer this modified technology to our customers around the world.