US (NJ): Crops grown in Pennsauken shipping container
The leafy crops, ideally destined for local salad plates, curl upward toward the warm glow of fluorescent lights.
“It’s like an optimal summer day,” explained 25-year-old Zeel Patel, one of three “founding farmers” for the Haddonfield Road venture. “And we have that all day, every day.”
Patel and his partners – Parth Chauhan and Raghav Garg, both 24, are childhood friends from Voorhees, where they grew up with an entrepreneurial spirit.
“We’ve been looking to do something together since we were kids,” Patel said. “We’ve always talked about it.”
The trio launched HomeGrown after Chauhan learned of a similar business in Japan. “They’re running a million heads of lettuce a month,” Patel said admiringly.
Patel says HomeGrown’s just landed its first customer — an academic food service that wants deliveries “three times a week for the foreseeable future.”
Eventually, they hope to ship 17,000 pounds of salad fixings each year from the blue-and-white container behind M&M Liquors. Long-term, they dream of expanding to a warehouse that would support larger plants like tomatoes.
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