The facility formerly used by indoor vertical farming startup Fifth Season, which shuttered last October, is now undergoing a marketing campaign to bring in a new lease holder or a new owner.
In marketing materials produced by commercial real estate firm CBRE Inc., the "fully equipped state-of-the-art facility" located at 1050 Talbot Ave. in Braddock is listed as having over 58,000 square feet of space.
An automated storage and retrieval system, which can be removed, and an automated building management system for heating, ventilation and air conditioning are listed as facility amenities, as is the solar microgrid system that Fifth Season had installed on-site weeks before its closure.
CBRE described the building as a "vertical farming/food facility" and included a sketch of an architectural floor plan outlining various spaces that could be used for growing, producing or storing food products, as well as spaces for preparing, processing and packaging food goods for distribution.
Jason Cannon, a senior vice president at CBRE, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did Shawn Fox, president of RDC Inc., the company that owns the building.
Before its shuttering last fall, Fifth Season employed about 100 workers, most of whom reported to its headquarters in The Highline building on the South Side while others worked out of the indoor farming facility now being marketed by CBRE. The startup raised over $75 million in outside investments and churned out about 500,000 pounds of leafy greens annually at its heavily automated Braddock farm, shipping fresh spinach and lettuce varieties harvested earlier in the same day to hundreds of stores across the multi-state region owned by retail customers like Giant Eagle Inc. and The Kroger Co., among others.
Shortly after Fifth Season's closure, Michael Von Lehman became tasked with trying to get Fifth Season's assets to turn a new leaf via an acquisition by another firm or otherwise, and the company has refrained from filing for bankruptcy since then.
Around the time of his appointment to this role in January, Von Lehman, who is also the president of Bellevue-based business consulting firm Meridian Management Partners, said that trying to "breathe new life" into the company is a priority "to repay some of its creditors something rather than just watch the dissolution of it happen" in what he described as "an unorderly fashion."
"There's no guarantee that we will be successful in this," Von Lehman said in January. "But the plan we put in place is to try to maximize the value of what Fifth Season created going forward for the benefit of everybody that was associated with it; the employees, the creditors and things of that nature."
