AI- and robotics-equipped indoor vertical farming startup Fifth Season scored one of its biggest grocery store partnerships since the company's founding in 2016, putting its products on shelves in about 200 Kroger stores in Ohio and Michigan.
It makes the first partnership for the startup and Cincinnati, Ohio-based Kroger Co., the nation's second-largest grocery store company behind Walmart Inc. The debut of its products in these 200 new stores — about 100 in each state — increases the footprint of stores where its products are available by 57%.
And while it's not the first time the company has sold its products in either state, it is the largest expansion of its product availability in either one thus far.
"We already had a presence in Cleveland and Columbus through Giant Eagle; they've been a foundational partner to us for a long time, but this is our first relationship here with Kroger, and we've had a little bit of distribution in Michigan, but this is definitely our biggest presence that we've ever had in Michigan," Fifth Season Chief Category Officer Grant Vandenbussche said. "It's going to almost double our business with one of the leading retailers in fresh food."
Fifth Season's products — various leafy vegetables grown and harvested indoors at its vertical farm in Braddock which are then packaged and sold as salads, mixed greens or in variety packs — are now available to customers in about 550 stores across a dozen states in a region that encompasses most of the Midwest.
"It's a really cool moment for us to pass that 500 mark and to continue to scale this thing," Vandenbussche said.
As for these newest stores to come online with their products, Vandenbussche said Fifth Season is able to deliver them to Kroger and have them on store shelves within 48 hours of harvesting them in the company's indoor farm. That time frame will likely drop even further following the completion of the company's Columbus farming facility, which it first announced in January 2022. The 180,000-square-foot site is expected to begin growing and harvesting produce in 2023 and will become the startup's second food-producing site, all of which is currently accomplished at the Braddock farm.
But Wednesday's expansion news is just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg lettuce as it relates to Fifth Season's continued efforts to offer its products across the nation.
"What's really even more exciting is that we're launching a couple of other customers in April and in mid-May we should be in over a thousand locations," Vandenbussche said. "Then with the opening of our Columbus facility next year, we plan to significantly increase our business and become available pretty much everywhere east of the Mississippi (River)…This is actually just the start of a big growth curve for us right now. The excitement across the entire organization is pretty palpable … we just couldn't be more excited right now."
Vandenbussche said Fifth Season and Kroger had been in talks for years to offer Fifth Season products on Kroger's store shelves. The culmination of those efforts were realized due to what Vandenbussche described as Fifth Season's ability to explain to the grocer that it can meet the demands of one of the nation's largest players in the industry.
"I really think it's a testament to the operational capabilities of our robotics platform because being able to do this on this large of a scale is not something that you can typically get, especially with outdoor-grown fields, which in some cases are subject to to the weather," Vandenbussche said. "Internally, we're really proud that we've gotten the business to a spot where we can support a partnership like this, and then most importantly, there are a lot of consumers out there, especially people in Michigan or people in Ohio, that have heard about our brand and heard about our product. Yinzers or Pittsburghers just aren't always only in Pittsburgh, they're also distributed elsewhere. They're looking to support Pittsburgh-based brands, so being able to be available in your community Kroger is just exciting for us as we think about getting the product to other people."
Fifth Season is now expecting to scale up to more than 100 full-time employees by early 2023. As of July 2021, it had about 80 workers, a figure that had doubled over the prior year. It officially declared The Highline on Pittsburgh's South Side as its headquarters in January, which will have it start with 7,000-square-feet of space with options to scale in the years to come.
Austin Webb serves as the company's CEO, while his brother, Brac Webb, also a co-founder, serves as chief operating officer and chief technology officer. Austin Lawrence completes the trio of the Carnegie Mellon University spinout company's co-founders.
