A closer look at how Local Bounti is committed to its talent & crops

Added on 14 July 2022

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The controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) industry is growing quickly, and with that growth comes growing pains. Greenhouse Grower Senior Editor Brian Sparks recently sat down with Craig Hurlbert, co-founder and co-CEO of fresh leafy greens producer Local Bounti, to learn more about the company's development, how its success starts with its team and continues through its technology, and more.

Brian Sparks: Let's start by talking about how Local Bounti was formed, and your current role at the company.

Craig Hurlbert: Our origin story is interesting. Travis Joyner (co-founder and co-CEO of Local Bounti) and I had a private equity firm where we were making investments to help management teams monetize their companies. We crossed paths with the controlled-environment agriculture space as it related to leafy greens about five years ago now, and we got very excited and wanted to make an investment in the space. We studied the industry and talked to a lot of technology providers and other companies, and long story short, we didn't find a business we felt was going about it in a way to succeed over the long term. And so, we shut down our private equity firm and started Local Bounti with the goal of starting a new chapter in agriculture - building a brand that would be around for generations to come.

Both Travis and I came from the energy world, where every single industrial facility has five people chasing down every single bit of efficiency that gets lost. And so that thinking led us to really focus on how you grow things in the most cap-ex and op-ex efficient manner and still give the plant exactly what it needs when it needs it, to taste fresh and delicious. When we started asking those questions, we realized that from our lens, the existing technology as it stood was not really focused on efficiency. With our proprietary Stack & Flow Technology we cracked that code, and because of that we were off to the races. Today, just a few years after beginning this journey, we are public on the NYSE under the ticker symbol LOCL, and have more than 250 employees with reach into 10,000 grocery stores and counting.

Brian Sparks: When it comes to gaining that technology and basic production knowledge, how did you go about working through that process and building a team that could focus on that?

Craig Hurlbert: We focused our attention early on finding talent in both the vertical and horizonal growing sectors. We got lucky very early on in finding folks that had relevant experience in both vertical and horizontal, which we've found is not very common. But what I will tell you is when you acquire a company that has been doing this for 25 years, the amount of talent and knowledge on the production side that you get is impossible to recreate. We got three things when we acquired Pete's. I'll focus on just one here, and I think it's the most important one: talent. We got people that have deep production experience, and importantly, alignment of our values. Local Bounti had this strong focus on unit economics and some production talent, but it's hard to get 25 years of production knowledge unless you've grown things for 25 years. When we combined our businesses together, it was complementary in so many ways, but production knowledge is one of the most important. And so, we've been able to take the best of both worlds, put them together and really have something unique for our shareholders and our employees to get behind.