WASHINGTON — For Mike and Jack Ross, their business origins were simple: they couldn’t find the healthy, nutritious, non-processed food they wanted in the grocery store, so they decided to grow it on their own.
Mike Ross has a background in Aerospace Engineering, while his younger brother has a degree in Computer Engineering. This powerhouse pair teamed up to create Beanstalk, a soil-based vertical farm that makes healthy meals easy to come by.
“We grow and deliver heirloom salads the day after harvest," Mike Ross said. "All of our salads are pesticide free, grown from natural seeds, and selected for nutrition and taste. And we invented a whole new method of farming to make that possible.”
The brothers first started experimenting in Jack Ross' college apartment and slowly started building bigger and better systems.
The Ross brothers then went out to Silicon Valley to participate in a startup accelerator program where they learned the tricks of trade in the tech community. Moving back to Virginia with the knowledge and confidence to expand, they bought their first small warehouse and as they put it “built a ship in a bottle."
Fast forward to the summer 2022, and they had built the 40,000-square-foot Beanstalk building that stands today in Herndon.
Beanstalk currently grows 20 acres worth of food in less than 5,000 square feet, using 99% less land and 95% less water than traditional outdoor farms.
Now you might be thinking, indoor farms are nothing new. But the way the Ross brothers are operating is.
“Indoor farms are prohibitively expensive to build and operate,” Mike Ross said. “And that’s because you’re trying to replicate everything a plant needs indoors. That requires, prior to Beanstalk, a lot of equipment a lot of components and a lot of robotics that were built for other industries.”
Mike and Jack Ross have simplified the infrastructure by pulling 80% of the components out of a typical indoor farm, making them cheaper to build, simpler to operate and easier to grow crops in soil.
“This is biology, this is nature," Mike Ross said. "And through a lot of trials and tribulations and experimentation, we realized that the plant needs to grow in soil."
The Ross brothers first tried hydroponics before realizing one simple thing.
“Soil exits for a reason," Mike Ross said. "It supports the healthy growth of nature.”
It's factor not all indoor farms take into account.
“They’re growing in foam or other synthetic media,” Jack Ross said. “Growing in that natural soil that has so much life in it already means that our crops are vibrant and very nutritious themselves. When it’s grown in a bit of a cooler environment where it always have access to water and healthy soil, it’s a happy plant it has less stress and is therefore a little bit sweeter it’s a little bit tastier."
The brothers shared a laugh over the sentiment, “Happy plants are tasty plants.”
Around 57% of the calories that most people eat are from ultra processed food; that's food that's made from extracting flavors out of other things. And as a result, 90% of Americans don't have enough fruits or veggies in their diet, leading to health concerns.
Beanstalk currently grows 20 types of crops with new varieties currently being tested. Heini Booysen is one of 13 employees at Beanstalk, and he spends his days finding new ways to use the crops they grow, incorporate them into premade salads and thinking of ways to enhance the product.
“I really love the micro greens," Booysen said. "There’s the nutritional value of it but it’s just the excitement around the taste. These are just things you’re not getting in the store."
He added that he enjoys having friends and family over to blind taste-test some of the unique greens grown at Beanstalk.
When asked how the two brothers who grew up together, and spend most of their waking hours enjoy working together, Mike Ross said they love it.
"We’ve worked together for a long time, including before beanstalk," he said. "We’re just different enough for it to really workout. We overlap a lot but we have our own little unique differences that I think make it interesting."
Beanstalk products only ship to local areas where they can be delivered the day after harvest. But their products are also starting to pop up in more groceries stores and the brother’s plant to build more vertical farms in other metropolitan areas across the country.
For a list of products offered and how to order, just click here.