Urban Vertical Farm in London

Hello. Welcome to our Blog at Yeeld. It has been a bit of a journey to get to this point, from our involvement with the Virgin Start-Up program to the design and build of our Vertical Farm, the plant science and now the marketing, sales and finances. It has certainly been fun thus far, now it is time to get our profile out there.
The vertical growing system we use was designed in-house and built completely by our founder Doug over the summer of 2018, with initial growing trials commencing in September. The next stage was perfecting the cultivation. We struggled a little at first with climate control but finally managed to get the temperature, humidity and air flow just right to achieve a perfect controlled climate to grow our microgreens all year round.
So, we decided after many deliberations to focus, at least initially, on three different microgreen mixes. Initially we planned to offer individual varieties but felt at this early stage it would be better to focus on three solid product offerings instead of doing a small amount of many varieties. We found very early on that each variety of microgreen has a whole host of different characteristics that either make them simple to grow or tricky.
In terms of branding, one of our unique selling points is our location. First off, before going any further we will no longer use the term “local”, normal farmers have overused that word, instead going forward we will use “hyper local” which refers solely to produce grown by Urban Vertical Farms like ours and any others out there. Most of the produce that is marketed as local will still be a minimum of 50-100 miles away from where it is consumed, assuming we are talking about central London here. Yeeld will bring that down to sub 5 miles, so you see we really are “hyper local”.
Branding wise we felt we should really lean on the locality concept to get this across to our customer base. We named each of our three mixes after a few of our catchment areas in West and South West London, these will no doubt evolve as we grow. Richmond Radish Mix, Putney Pea Shoot Mix and Fulham Fresh Mix. We feel this will help to drive the image of fresh, hyper local produce that is harvested that morning, packaged and then delivered in under 90 minutes. Effectively a more efficient version of Farm-To-Table than “normal” farmers like to align themselves with. Yeeld is Farm-To-Table 2.0