Eden Green Is Set on Fixing America’s Produce Sourcing Problem
An excerpt from Supply Chain Brain
The U.S. has a produce sourcing problem. Over 90% of the country’s lettuce comes from California's Salinas and Imperial Valleys, and Yuma, Arizona — meaning that almost all of the lettuce eaten by consumers on the East Coast has traveled more than 3,000 miles. Now, Eden Green, a Texas-based vertical farming company, is working to fix America’s lettuce issue.
Chief executive officer Eddy Badrina says the waste from cross-country travel and transportation costs aren't economically sustainable. Which poses an interesting question: What would happen if you could move farms closer to consumers and distributors?
“For the end consumer, we’re solving a guilt and shame problem,“ Badrina says. “They know the product is going to go bad in four days, but they buy it anyway because they’re guilted into healthy eating.”
Badrina explains that a vast majority of Americans can’t afford to throw away a bag of lettuce four days after buying it, so the localization problem puts them at an unfair disadvantage because they’re forced to use the produce sooner than others.
To solve this, Eden Green has begun operating vertical greenhouses outside of Dallas, Texas, just yards away from a distribution center that supplies more than 150 grocery stores across the country. The greenhouses, which are capable of growing up to 2 million pounds of lettuce per year, provide stores with lettuce that goes from farm to shelf in as little as 48 hours.