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.
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.
Imported produce is typically aggressively price-competitive with the local stuff.
Here is a small scale example [1] but I can't fault this guy for keeping it small given his advanced age. I hope I have that much energy when I am older.
Shipping isn't that damaging to plants, compared to a 55mph wind.
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.
I challenge you to slice a thawed tomato the way you would a vine fresh one and tell me there isn't a difference. Same goes for most leafy greens and fruits.
Delicate cellular structures of high water content vegetables are completely obliterated when frozen and then thawed or otherwise processed.
But if you’re going to blend it, who cares.
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.
If this reduces our carbon footprint and gives us fresher food as a bonus I'm all for it.
Initial trials went well, now they're rolling it out to 10 more locations:
https://www.businessinsider.com/white-castle-adds-more-flipp...
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.
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.
There are numerous process and operational differences between things made to order and things prepped and shipped. Both are honestly extremely impressive, though the latter is much farther along technologically in part because the scale of impact is greater and factories allow for larger capital expenditure since it's so much lower on a per product basis. That said, what I am talking about doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the quality of the end product.
>If you're retrofitting a kitchen designed for humans, systems like what White Castle is experimenting with might make sense
That's what they're doing. Sure, if you build all new buildings and kitchens it may make less sense but as a lower capital cost shift it totally fits.
>BTW, automated restaurants are not new; look up 'automat'.
Automating production is new. Automating service is not. Again, huge difference operationally.
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.
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?
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.
It'll just replace some.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.