From Shipping Container to Table: Adapt Brings Urban Mushroom Farms to America

Canadian vertical farming startup Adapt AgTech is partnering with Reef Technology to bring its mushroom growing shipping containers to major cities across the United States, starting with Austin.

Reef transforms urban real estate like parking lots into mobility and logistics hubs and currently operates over 8,000 locations in hundreds of cities. The partnership will help Adapt place its shipping containers within walking distance of customers such as restaurants and grocery stores, without having to pay the astronomical rent of commercial or industrial space in a downtown area.

Adapt opened its first shipping container in Austin and began deliveries to restaurants this week. Over the next few years, the startup plans to expand to more than 50 locations, including Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and Miami.

“Our model is to create hyper-local farms in densely populated urban areas to reduce the distance between the farm and the plate,” Jonathan Murray, CEO and Founder of Adapt AgTech, told TechCrunch.

Adapt's network of shipping container farms specializes in "aberrant gourmet mushrooms", which are gourmet mushrooms that were not available in North American retail until very recently. Think pink, yellow, blue and king oysters, chestnut mushrooms and the trendy lion's mane.

"Mushrooms are very, very suitable for growing in containers compared to other crops like leafy greens due to energy consumption," Murray continued. "They don't need a huge amount of light. It's really just temperature and humidity."

Adapt, which launched in February 2022, delivered its first truss in June last year to a Toronto site. The company has grown steadily ever since and now has farms in Ottawa, Vancouver, Halifax, Kingston and Austin. On February 17, Adapt announces that it will launch a partnership with Loblaws, Canada's largest retailer, starting with two flagship stores in downtown Toronto, moving on to dozens more in Toronto and Ottawa before expanding. expand elsewhere over the following months.

Adapt will also roll out with retail banners under Canadian grocery chains Sobeys and Pattison Food Group in 2023.

"By the end of 2023, we will be available in the stores of at least three of the five largest retailers in Canada, from Halifax to Vancouver and in between, which together represent more than 3,500 stores" , Murray said.

Adapt recently closed a seed round with Climate VC Congruent, and it will use the funds to expand its base and hire more support.

Image credits: Adapt AgTech

Adapt AgTech designs and manufactures its shipping containers in Delta, BC. In addition to the five containers in service today, Adapt recently started production on 16 more units and aims to deploy more than 25 units over the next 12 months. Some of Adapt's shipping containers are solar-powered with backup outlets, but in an effort to launch quickly in the United States, the startup will plug its shipping containers into the grid. Power consumption, Murray said, is low - about 10 kilowatt hours per day.

The company's distribution model is akin to a hub and spoke. Adapt uses a centralized center in Kingston, Ontario to do all the lab work and colonize the substrate blocks, which means it allows the mycelium, the root structure of pleasure...