GrowUp Farms: SME of the Year

At a glance
Who: GrowUp Farms  
What: Innovative vertical farming company  
Where: Kent, UK  
When: 2024  
Why: Pioneer lower-impact food production processes 

Climate scientists estimate that agriculture and land-use account for a quarter of global annual emissions and attribute 75% of deforestation by area size to industrial agriculture. This is without mentioning agriculture’s huge water footprint and how intensive, mono-crop farming with chemical inputs can damage soils and ecosystems.   

Because need to keep producing enough food to sustain a growing global population, innovative approaches are needed.  

The Solution:   

Vertical farming can significantly reduce environmental impacts of agriculture including land use, water use, pesticide and fertiliser use. It can also enhance productivity by enabling growing indoors, year-round.   

British firm GrowUp Farms is pioneering, not only its vertical farming methods, which make use of self-generated energy, but its broader business strategy and its social impact. The firm notably has a combined impact and finance team.  

GrowUp Farms is a benefit company that is certified as a B Corp and as a Living Wage Employer. In 2023, it was named as a Sunday Times Best Place to Work.  

How it works:   

British firm GrowUp Farms began selling salads from its Pepperness farm in Kent to retailers in January 2023, after several years of selling to restaurants at a smaller scale.  

Pepperness represented a £100m investment and took three years to develop, a process which proved particularly challenging due to the pandemic and the subsequent energy price crisis. Generate Capital led the investment in the location.  

At Pepperness, which was built on a disused car park, GrowUp Farms generates its own solar electricity and has also implemented efficiency measures resulting in a 33% drop in electricity use. The facility makes use of water-saving measures and nutrient recycling systems to further drive down the environmental footprint of its salads.  

Vertical farming is a new and fast-growing industry, and GrowUp Farms has already pre-empted sustainability challenges across environmental and social fields. For example, it is already researching ways of reducing the embodied emissions of future farms through novel design and material use.   

GrowUp Farms is taking innovative approaches to have a positive impact on people. Its impact and finance teams are one and the same and it is a Living Wage Employer. The business emphasises sustainability in all onboarding days and regularly hosts ‘town halls’ and staff surveys to keep engagement on related issues high throughout the year.  

Beyond its own operations, GrowUp Farms supports the local Wildlife Trust branch and Wilder Carbon – a British nature-based non-profit focused on carbon removal. It regularly engages with the UK Government on food system sustainability, advocating for progressive change that could mainstream vertical farming.  

The results:   

Pepperness-grown salads are now stocked in hundreds of supermarket locations across the UK. The farm produces as much salad as 1,000 acres of productive farmland.   

The team credits its innovative approach to energy management, including self-generation, as the reason it survived and thrived through the energy crisis while several competitors did not. GrowUp Farms believes its model could offer solutions to future-proof food production against not only future energy crises but also other challenges such as extreme weather and international supply chain disruption.   

The Judges said: “We were impressed by the range of achievements GrowUp Farms has achieved, from using 100% renewable energy to certifying as a B Corp. We would not be surprised if the business grows significantly in the near future.”