A three-year-old Colorado company has an ambitious goal: to bring food security, safety, and sustainability to communities in need around the world. FarmBox Foods aims to achieve that goal by connecting those communities to sustainably sourced food that's grown locally inside one of their container farms.
Their first product was a vertical hydroponic farm, or VHF, built inside a shipping container. The company has since developed a second product: a gourmet mushroom farm, or GMF.
So far, customers in Colorado include Centura Health, Vitamin Cottage Natural Food Markets and the C Lazy U Ranch in Granby.
FarmBox CEO Rusty Walker and COO Jake Savageau joined to talk about how they hope to change the way the world thinks about farming.
Walker: "Our goal and our mission is to get our products out into the communities where we can help develop food security programs. We’re looking to get into food deserts, opportunities where folks in the world might not have access to good, clean nutritional food. And so we kind of strive as a company that’s driven to feed the world one container at a time. And we’re ready to go out and manufacture thousands of these if we can."
"One big area that we’re really focusing on is the urban areas throughout the U.S. where they don’t have a lot of land to grow. These farms can go right into the parking lots, behind a church for example. We’re working with a community church on the south side of Chicago that’s looking at placing two of these containers – a vertical hydroponic farm and a mushroom farm – right outside in the parking lot outside the church."
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