Inside Europe’s largest VF, growing a tenth of Lithuania’s salad

Civinskas’s startup, Leafood, grows 12 kinds of green salad and herbs all year round in a massive warehouse on the industrial outskirts of Vilnius. The farm will become operational this week and when it reaches its full capacity later this year, it’s set to harvest a tonne of edible leaves per day — around a tenth of the total demand in Lithuania. 

New vertical farms have been mushrooming around Europe in recent years — but with last year’s energy price spikes, high inflation hitting consumers’ pockets and the economic recession, many such startups are struggling.

Last year Berlin-based Infarm, which has raised $471m from some of Europe’s biggest VCs, was forced to lay off around 500 people — more than half of its workforce. Earlier in 2022 France’s Agricool, which had raised €30m, went bankrupt. 

But Civinskas says the size of his farm and the experience of one of its investors, a Taiwanese vertical farms maker YesHealth, puts Leafood in a different league — and he expects the company to be profitable by the end of the year. The startup has raised €6m in equity to date.

“You’ll see a lot of bad news around vertical farming companies — because how can they be profitable when they are raising hundreds of millions to build that [small] size farm? The payback is impossible for investors. They’re selling a vision, which is very difficult to realise; there is no economics behind it,” he says. 

Technology

Leafood uses a variation of the hydroponics technology — which uses water instead of soil to grow plants — popular with many vertical farming companies. Its plants are seeded in floating cubes of gel, made of water and nutrients.

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Photo: Leafood vertical farm. Picture by Mauro Battellini for Sifted

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