The future is coming and it’s being built on innovation, creativity and soul. Take InFarm, a self-contained agricultural centre that is currently being tested in a Metro store in Berlin. Made of glowing modular boxes, it is the ultimate in-store vertical farm, using every single centimetre of space and allowing supermarkets to sell the freshest greens possible, literally. It is like having both a field and a farmers’ market in the same tiny area, thanks to a building-block approach that is highly efficient and affordable, without any wasted space or energy.
And of course, the benefits are too many to mention – for instance no transport, no storage, no refrigeration.
Even though other self-sustainable solutions, such as rooftop greenhouses, have been trialled before, InFarm does not require any work on the infrastructure of a building and appears to be the most effective. The pilot unit has been running for almost six months inside a wholesale supermarket in Germany, starting with a business to business model that is similar to what happens in the software industry. The Metro chain, in fact, pays a low price for the units and then pays for a software that helps any employee handle the system through an app.
