“…Nona Yehia readily admits that her company, Vertical Harvest, which she helped start in 2010, made plenty of mistakes, like how to manage airflow and humidity. But the reason Vertical Harvest is still around is the scale of those mistakes.
“My colleagues and competitors made big mistakes with big money and big farms,” she said. “We made small mistakes with small money and small farms.”
She said the first wave of vertical farms had approached business as if they were huge, established food companies, and not start-ups. Their business plan was “large-scale, commodity lettuce sold into retail at thin margins,” she wrote in an email, a difficult proposition against established competition…”