Eden Green Technology CEO Eddy Badrina reflects on challenges, opportunities for CEA
Excerpt from the Produce Grower article
Moving beyond leafy greens
Leafy greens have dominated the CEA market, but now, that sector is saturated. That doesn’t mean there’s no room for growth, Badrina says.
“As the cost comes down on the production side of CEA and prices goes up in the overall produce market, I think you’ll see that market share expanding because all the macro trends,” he explains. “From an environmental perspective, from a supply chain perspective, all the macro trends point toward more CEA and not less. I think it’s really incumbent on the industry players like us to make sure it’s affordable and it’s economically positive to meet that demand.”
There’s very little price elasticity when it comes to a commodity like lettuce, he adds, which “requires the industry to continue focusing on unit-level economics, which then passes down to the consumer to where it’s not such a huge gap between conventional lettuce that you see on a wet wall and then the clamshell packages you see right next to it.”
Some lettuce growers added salad kits, which resonated with consumers. And there are companies that will continue to successfully make inroads on high-cost items, such as Oishii strawberries, he predicts.
While Eden Green still grows leafy greens, they’ve added the major suite of herbs to their production offerings.
“It’s proven to be a great strategic shift for us. One, because herbs have higher margins, and two, because our core technology — our grow towers — hasn’t changed,” he adds.
Other opportunities include providing nutraceuticals, he says.
Nutraceuticals are products derived from food sources that provide both nutritional and medicinal benefits. Nutraceuticals are also known as functional foods, medical foods, designer foods, phytochemicals and nutritional supplements.
The term nutraceutical was coined in 1989 by Stephen DeFelice, who was the founder and chairperson of the Foundation for Innovation in Medicine located in Cranford, New Jersey. DeFelice defined a nutraceutical as a “food, or parts of a food, that provide medical or health benefits, including the prevention and treatment of disease.”
Badrina says because of the crops CEA traditionally grows, the industry has always played a role in proactive wellness, but there’s still room for expansion.
“Proactive wellness is a huge multi-billion-dollar industry, made up of products that require more natural derivatives, especially when it comes to fruit and herbs. We believe there is a need for produce like ours, because one of the current drawbacks regarding nutraceuticals is consumers don’t know where the base ingredients are coming from. It could be from overseas or China, so there’s this lack of quality,” he says. “If we can provide a competitive, price-conscious product that can go in a base ingredient to some of these nutraceuticals, we feel like that’s a huge win for us — for the industry. It’s a huge win for the consumer in terms of safety and knowledge. And then it localizes and decentralizes the reliance on foreign plants and herbs to the U.S. market.”