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I think you've nailed what this is. Much like the "robot burger chain" and other such ventures, it's another niche novelty for the rich.
by aphextron 6y ago
I think you've nailed what this is. Much like the "robot burger chain" and other such ventures, it's another niche novelty for the rich.
- adamnemecek 6y agoI mean so is all new tech. Over time the price will go down and be affordable by more people.
- monadic3 6y agoIn this case it seems directly proportional to the cost of energy, barring a solution where you use passive ways (like mirrors) to redirect light into the building.
- busterarm 6y agoThe sun delivers several orders of magnitude more energy and is free...
- stretchcat 6y agoWhy would the price of food from a 'vertical farm' (shipping container in a parking lot) go down relative to the price food from regular farms? Even if it made sense to grow using LEDs instead of direct sunlight, that could be done on rural land instead of urban parking lots. I don't think you'll ever get enough food grown in shipping containers in urban parking lots to be anything other than a curiosity for the wealthy. These things are small by garden standards, let alone farm standards. How many people could one of these shipping containers keep fed? How many shipping containers would you need to feed a city of a million people?
- airstrike 6y agoShipping costs virtually zero
- stretchcat 6y agoA single truck can ship more food in one trip than one of these containers could produce in a year.
- pydry 6y agoThe same way any new tech goes down in price - commoditization, automation and economies of scale. It's unlikely they'll feed a million people all the food they'll need but it's likely they could feed a million people all of the leafy greens they need.
- stretchcat 6y ago"commoditization, automation and economies of scale." Traditional farms have the clear and overwhelming advantage in all three of these. And they aren't standing still either, they benefit from the advance of technology too.
- pydry 6y agoThe major advantage this has is that it shrinks the supply chain. Transporting fresh leafy greens is a bit of a nightmare because they go bad so quickly. I don't expect these things to compete with a farm growing potatoes for a long while or even anything which keeps well enough in a fridge.
- inglor_cz 6y agoDepends where you live. US has a lot of high-quality natural soil. Places like Israel and Saudi Arabia are much more limited by nature.
- Funes- 6y ago>How many shipping containers would you need to feed a city of a million people? I guess the aspiration for the people behind this kind of vertical farming companies is to have as many containers out there as possible. It seems like proximity of supply is one of their main purported selling points. It makes sense from their standpoint.
- ameister14 6y agoYes, you nailed it - White Castle is a niche novelty for the rich.
- neartheplain 6y agoWhoah, I hadn't heard of White Castle's kitchen-bot. Pretty cool. Initial trials went well, now they're rolling it out to 10 more locations: https://www.businessinsider.com/white-castle-adds-more-flippy-robot-cooks-2020-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/white-castle-adds-more-flipp...
- stretchcat 6y agoFactory produced white castle burgers have been in supermarket freezers for years (and aren't much worse than the 'fresh' ones, which are themselves firmly in the realm of junk food.) Machines making food is nothing new, but it seems a lot of people are keen on 'inventing' it. Remember the pizza company that wanted to use robots to make delivery pizzas? And the results were worse than frozen Red Baron pizzas that have been around since the 70s.
- ameister14 6y agoThere's a pretty significant difference between robot made to order and robot made to freeze. As you said, the latter has been around for a long time. That doesn't make the former any less of an achievement. This is robotics directly replacing employees in store.
- stretchcat 6y agoThere really isn't much difference, the quality of a frozen white castle burger is about the same as fresh made by humans, and I doubt fresh made by robots would be much better. All three are going to be pretty crap. The robot pizza company in particular was a joke. Viewed with a critical eye, the whole thing was technophiles blinded to obvious reality by their love for high tech gadgetry. Why else would you use a sophisticated robotic arm to transfer a pizza from one machine to another when a simple conveyor belt can do the job faster and need less space to do it? White Castle is doubtlessly being smarter about it, but I'm pretty sure you could replace their restaurant employees with a microwave oven. BTW, automated restaurants are not new; look up 'automat'. If you're retrofitting a kitchen designed for humans, systems like what White Castle is experimenting with might make sense, but if you were to design an automatic kitchen from the ground up, I think it makes little sense.
- mediaman 6y agoIn California, yes, because they are grown naturally there, and growing in a vertical farm seems kind of pointless, except as novelty. But on the East Coast, vertical farms can serve a useful economic purpose for some crops which would otherwise be trucked in from the Salinas Valley.
- busterarm 6y agoThe transportation costs of produce have been demonstrated to be negligible. Imported produce is typically aggressively price-competitive with the local stuff.
- alpha_squared 6y agoCould that be because we don't yet have a carbon offset cost for transportation? I recognize that the actual cost would be controversial and mostly subjective, but I always wonder about how many things are 'free' or nearly just because there are otherwise hidden costs elsewhere (such as the environment).
- busterarm 6y agoThis math has already been done. Even if you figured the carbon offset cost, transporting agriculture still beats out all of these alternatives by a lot. The math is only becomes slightly favorable to the subset of plants with high water content and lower sunlight tolerance. You can grow tomatos at nearly break-even. A diverse set of agriculture that can sustain people with balanced diets? Not a chance.
- epistasis 6y agoThat trucking process means getting produce optimized for transport, rather than produce optimized for flavor. The costs are not only in dollars, but in quality.
- busterarm 6y agoYou're telling me that produce grown in its optimal environmental conditions and flash-frozen at harvest is going to taste worse than something grown in a truck in a parkinglot in Brooklyn? I call bullshit. It's pretty much universally agreed that frozen fruit is fresher and often tastes better, for example. Flavor is more about varieties being selected for mass production rather than their growing method and transportation. You can transport heirloom tomatoes. Nothing stopping you.
- baxtr 6y agoDidn't literally anything common nowadays start out exactly like this?
- blackearl 6y agoMost of the examples in the articles are grocery stores. The one restaurant mentioned looks like a burger joint, an upscale one, but a burger joint nonetheless. The gap between a whole foods vs a stop n shop is not that large, certainly nothing like the gap between a mcdonalds and a black tie restaurant. If this reduces our carbon footprint and gives us fresher food as a bonus I'm all for it.
- 908B64B197 6y agoThe thing is, burgers are the same everywhere. Minimal wage isn't. So once there's a robot that can cook burger in SF and break even, it works pretty much everywhere else where the minimum wage is greater or equal. Just take a look at Miso robotics.
- wavefunction 6y agoI find myself patronizing the fast-food locations that offer food prepared from fresh potatoes sliced every morning and grass-fed beef that apparently pay their workers a decent wage while costing about the same as the places that don't. The difference I suppose is that the local chains are not satisfying profit motives of stock speculators.
- bluGill 6y agoOnce the robot exists you can duplicate it cheaper. Once it works in SF with high wages it works in Montana with low wages. It may eventually not work out in poorer countries.
- OldHand2018 6y ago> Once it works in SF with high wages it works in Montana with low wages. Can it? The robot in SF may make financial sense because of high utilization. A low-wage worker can do 100+ useful tasks when the restaurant is not busy enough to require constant burger making. Is a burger-making robot flexible enough to match that?
- bluGill 6y agoThe robot can also sit around doing nothing without complaint and for no extra cost. So the robot need not be used 100% of the time. Even in SF the robot will not be used much at 2am. Though I was referring to the small cities in Montana. Nobody will put a robotic burger joint where there are no people. However a town of 5000 has a lot of people who need to eat, more than enough to make it worth running numbers.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
- wernercd 6y agoWhat's available to the rich today becomes available to all tomorrow. Cars, TVs, Cell phones...