Name: This Company Wants More People to Grow Their Own Food
Uploaded: 2016-05-23
Duration: 3 min 9 s
Description: Using this bookshelf-sized ecosystem

So, tell me about Grove. Describe the product. Sure. So, we started Grove to help everybody grow some of their own fresh food in homes and in classrooms. So, we build the Grove ecosystem, it's a product about the size of a bookshelf. Sort of furniture / appliance where you grow fresh culinary herbs, fruits and vegetables on two levels And then you've got an aquarium on the bottom where the fish actually fertilize those two levels of gardening. So, the fish are an integral part of the system. Their waste fertilizes the plants. Provides the nitrogen for the plants and then plants clean that water and the water goes back through the aquarium. So, it's a really cool closed loop ecosystem. Really efficient way of growing crops. Three weeks in, you're ready to add fish, and introduce that. And what's the, what's the point here? It's incredibly cool looking, obviously, and I'm sure, like, a big conversation starter when people walk into your home, but what's the point of all this? So, vertical farming, growing crops in controlled environments Closer to where people live is gonna be a major sort of force that shapes our world over the next few decades. In these early days Grove is really about inspiring and educating. That's why we're in dozens of classrooms, that's why a lot of our customers have children and they like to do this as a family. It's really about showing people what's possible. Over time it'll become actually about growing more of your own food in your home on rooftops in vertical farms in warehouses and different places like that. Right now the system costs $ 4500, so at some point will it actually be cheaper to grow? Your own food. Well, the point of food should not be to have it as cheap as possible. It should be to raise healthy people. It should be to not just have calories, but to have nutrients. So the closer you can get these greens to where people actually consume them, the less nutrient loss you have over these 1500 mile long supply chains. The vast majority of nutrients are actually lost in those refrigerated supply chains. To the point where what you're eating at the store, it's like a shell of what a nutrient dense plant. But to get to any kinda mass scale, which at this point you guys have sold several hundred of these I think. Yep. To get to any mass scale and get more people eating healthier. You need to bring the cost down, so when does that happen? If you look at the introduction of any new appliance into the home, whether it's the first refrigerator in the 40s and 50s or the first microwave, these things always started $ 8, 000, $ 10, 000. Some people were skeptical. Why do I need to do that? We have another way of cleaning our dishes or of getting our food from the grocery store. So it takes some time for new concepts to sort of enter into people's homes and lives. The good thing is, is that 41 million Americans already garden. They already know how to grow food, they're already excited about it, and they don't all do it to save money. A lot of them do it because gardening is really at the core of who we are as humans.