Plenty Opens Richmond, Closes Compton

Dr. Sean Campbell & Jennifer Polanz

Plenty Unlimited, Inc. opened the doors on their Richmond, Virginia, facility, in late September, marking the opening of the “world’s first farm to grow indoor, vertically farmed berries at scale.” Then, in mid-December, they announced they would be closing the Compton, California, vertical farm that had been producing leafy greens since May 2023.

“This is a bittersweet moment in Plenty’s journey. Compton was our first commercial farm and marked our transition from a startup to a scaling business,” they wrote in the announcement. “But the rising cost of doing business in California, including climbing energy prices, made operating here challenging. Closing this chapter was not a decision we made lightly, but it was a necessary step as we shift our focus to strawberries.”

That Richmond strawberry farm is designed to produce an excess of 4 million pounds of strawberries for Driscoll’s annually, as they use less than 40,000 sq. ft. This is accomplished by growing vertically on 30-ft. tall towers hung from the ceiling, as opposed to the stacked, horizontal bed system favored by other companies.

They touted the farm’s use of novel technologies, from AI-controlled grow rooms to patent-pending pollination methods for “more efficient and effective pollination than using bees.” The first berries are expected to be commercially available early this year.