Former U-M Students Taking Planted Detroit to New Heights

Apr 08, 2024

By Ann Zaniewski

An indoor vertical farm in Detroit is celebrating a fresh start and new partnerships that will put salads on tables across the state, including at the University of Michigan.

Planted Detroit relaunched in January after restructuring and streamlining its operations.

Founded by Ross School of Business alum Thomas Adamczyk, the company uses hydroponic technology to grow several types of lettuces, herbs, microgreens and edible flowers indoors. It sells ready-to-eat salad kits and greens in bulk.

After closing last summer amid financial challenges, Planted Detroit now has a network of partner companies that handle most of its non-core operations, such as salad kit assembly and delivery. Adamczyk said the new model has allowed the company to focus on what it does best: growing delicious, nutritious, high-quality food.

“Our vision is a salad on every table,” he said.

Adamczyk started Planted Detroit in 2018 with the belief that vertical farming is the future of agriculture. He converted a former warehouse in Detroit’s Islandview neighborhood into a farm.

The first two years were largely spent on developing and perfecting the grow process, said his sister, Colleen Miller, a fellow Ross alum who joined the company last year as director of partnership and sales.

Planted Detroit’s initial customers were restaurants and chefs. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, it shifted its focus to direct-to-consumer salad kits.

However, the original business model — which involved Planted employees handling everything from farming to salad production and product delivery — proved to be unprofitable, leading to a temporary closure in August. Adamczyk and Miller decided to outsource most non-farming operations as part of a reorganization.

“Manufacturing, logistics and driving trucks around distracted us from our core competency,” Miller said. “We are a sophisticated, high-tech farm good at growing delicious, nutrient dense food. That’s what we needed to focus on.”

Planted Detroit’s new partners include Lipari Foods, JLM Manufacturing, Carmela Foods, Frog Holler, LaGrasso Bros. Produce, the delivery service FULFLLD and Cindy’s Kitchen salad dressings.

With the restructuring, Planted Detroit was able to rehire eight of the roughly 60 employees who were laid off during the shutdown. Adamczyk hopes to bring back more people this spring.

The company also lowered the price of its salad kits from $14 to $10.50. It sells five varieties: Sweet & Savory, Protein Fusion, Pearled Couscous, Golden Sesame and Spicy Avocado. Customers can order them online for direct delivery or buy them at specialty shops across the state, including the small-format Meijer stores at Woodward Corners in Royal Oak and Rivertown Market in Detroit.

Planted Detroit salads will be available for purchase beginning March 6 on U-M’s Ann Arbor campus at Eigen Cafe, Mujo Cafe, Maizie’s Kitchen and Market and UMMA Cafe. After touring the farm in February, representatives from the U-M Environment, Health and Safety office approved Planted Detroit as an official university supplier in partnership with MDining.

“It’s rewarding for the Planted team to have such a high-profile university with such a large health and safety department say they were impressed by the facility,” Miller said.

Adamczyk added: “U-M is really important to us. It’s not only our alma mater and where we started, but it has the next generation of people who are moving into their careers. It’s an important place to start with establishing good habits for health and wellness.”

Adamczyk and Miller said they’re excited about fostering educational partnerships with units across the university, such as the schools of business, public health and environment and sustainability.

In February, BOND, a U-M student consulting club, selected Planted Detroit as one of its clients. Club members will provide free consulting services around capacity planning, product line analysis and market research.

“It’s a socially conscious brand, and they’re having a great impact,” Samantha Ritter, a sophomore data science major and project manager with the BOND Consulting Group, said. “We’re really proud to be representing them, and we’re extremely proud they’ll be selling on campus, as well.”

Club members toured the farm and sampled salads. Ritter said it was fascinating to learn how Planted Detroit worked with chefs to adjust the lighting color and intensity to optimize plant flavor.

“I’ve never had such a well-designed salad,” she said.

Adamczyk continues to look for ways to highlight the educational opportunities around vertical farming. He set up a small hydroponic growing system at the Detroit Academy of Arts and Sciences so sixth-graders there can learn first-hand about the benefits of growing produce indoors.

Inside Planted Detroit today, thousands of plants grow on tall metal shelves underneath LED lighting as nutrient-rich water flows into their roots. There is leafy romaine, kale, pak choi, golden and scarlet frills, and pea shoots for the salad kits, along with several varieties of edible flowers, microgreens and herbs.

“It’s a biosecure, food-safe, controlled environment, with very hi-tech HVAC systems and water systems,” Miller said.

Miller said the company is laser-focused on both product safety and freshness. The greens are typically harvested every Friday. JLM Manufacturing assembles them into salad kits the following Monday.

“Because of this model, we’re able to keep everything very fresh and turn it around to stores super quickly, and not lose any nutritional value or shelf life value in the transit,” she said.

Looking ahead, Miller and Adamczyk are exploring ways to expand Planted Detroit. They’re in the midst of finalizing a wholesale partnership that will allow a wider distribution of the company’s products to chefs and restaurants.

Adamczyk said vertical farming has historically been uneconomical due to high upfront capital costs and low price points for produce — but that is changing.

“At the highest level, I believe our current food system is not sustainable, and that we need to think outside the box to marry technology and agriculture,” he said. “Growing food indoors will become a necessity. … I also believe automation is essential to commercialization of vertical farming.”

Adamczyk, who grew up in Southgate, said he established Planted Detroit in Detroit because of the city’s vibrant culinary scene and need for more locally sourced food.

He said the layout of the city and its suburbs is the perfect setting for a hub-and-spoke distribution model of a farm-to-fork experience.

“Detroit has driven innovation and automation within the automotive industry for the last 100 years,” he said, “so what better place to innovate on food production?”

Source : umich.edu

Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”