“You’ve got to scale up in steps before you start to build large-scale facilities,” says founder Daniel Tzvetkoff.
Image credit: Stacked Farm
Australia’s
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De-risking before delivery
The Las Vegas R&D facility opened earlier this month, and follows the same model Stacked Farms used in Australia.
At its core, the Las Vegas facility is about de-risking operations before actually opening the large-scale farm.
“You can’t open a large-scale farm and then have customers sign off on the product or optimize the product at that point,” explains Tzvetkoff. “What we saw with a lot of other vertical farms in the US is that they built these things thinking the sales would just come, without understanding that the sales pipeline is quite long.”
Stacked Farm has maintained a sales team on the ground in the US for nearly three years, he adds. Meanwhile, it has long-term supply agreements with Great West Produce in California and Lagudi Fresh Food Group in Nevada, as well as retail distributor Mana Foods.
“You have to first make sure the customers are locked in, happy with the product, before you’ve opened the doors [of the large-scale facility] and customers are ready to take delivery,” says Tzvetkoff. “Now it’s all about product sign off before the facility opens.”
