“Although we recently entered the Italian market, we are receiving many requests for our farms. The most attractive part of it is that we can offer tailored technologies in which we can reduce environmental and economic costs of the farm structure,” Daniele Bertocchi, Co-founder of GREATIT says.
Daniele Bertocchi and Camilla Paletti are the co-founders of GREATIT, an Italian startup supplier of container farms and microgreen growers. GREATIT supplies customized container farms, experimenting with their prototype farm DEMETRA, used to improve the product over time.
Daniele and Camilla
Customized container farms
“We implement dissemination policies and offer educational and training activities on values, the principles of food education, environmental sustainability and on the circular economy,” says Daniele. He explains that the containers are for anyone who wants to improve the stages of their production cycle by a customer-tailored farm.
GREATIT was founded as the founders wanted to allow access for anyone to nutritious, low-footprint and environmentally sustainable products. “We are really looking forward to the future helping people in producing healthy food. In a context where it’s not dependent on intensive agriculture, but sustainable agriculture instead,” Daniele noted.
Opening the market
Besides supplying products, they’re also on the farming side of things. Inside the DEMETRA, they are producing microgreens and selling them to near neighbors such as individuals, such as health gurus, vegetarians and vegans.
In Italy microgreens are certainly a niche, says Daniele. Microgreens, in fact, are known almost exclusively by high-profile restaurant chefs, who enhance the aesthetics only to garnish the dishes and therefore without making use of their nutritional content. GREATIT wants to open this market and make sure that microgreens are available to anyone.
Daniele adds, ”We can grow any type of vegetables in our farm, which allows us to expand into any vegetables according to the market demand. We are therefore not precluding the cultivation and sale of any product.”
Vertical farming in Italy
As Italy is still ‘stuck’ in traditional agriculture, Daniele hopes to expand the company quickly. His goal is to create a network of urban farms that can help solve some of the major environmental and social challenges of the 21st century, such as malnutrition, obesity, water and land consumption, and increasing carbon dioxide.
Daniele adds, “I really hope that the Italian State will make it easier to develop companies like us through personalized legislation which, unfortunately, does not exist at the moment.” He recommends starting farmers not to stop at the first bureaucratic difficulties and always aspire to the environmental sustainability of their structures. “Only by reducing the high energy consumption of today’s vertical agriculture will we be able to apply this type of agriculture on a large scale in the future,” Daniele notes.
For more information:
Daniele Bertocchi, co-founder
[email protected]
GREATIT
www.greatit.it