Peterson is the founder and owner of Vigeo Gardens, an indoor farm inside Akron's Bounce Innovation Hub business incubator that grows about 250,000 pounds of microgreens, lettuce, herbs, and wheatgrass per year. As soon as it's harvested, the produce gets packed into 4-ounce portions, or units, and shipped to area grocers and restaurants.
It all takes place on the third floor of Bounce, where Peterson and his team nurture the plants propagated in soil formulated for their short lives and feed them a steady stream of nutrients via a hydroponic system as the sprouts reach for their sun — in this case, high-tech LED lights a few inches above them.
"We'll be on pace by the end of this year to do more than 1 million units a year," Peterson said. Such claims from him are not new. But nor are they lacking in credibility.
Back at the beginning of 2022, Peterson said if he couldn't grow the business dramatically in the next year or two, he would shut it down. That was after he had been noticed and praised for bringing in $1 million in annual revenue for the first time in 2019.
Read the entire article at Crain's Cleveland Business.