Stepping Up: 80 Acres Farms Builds its Case for Scalable Vertical Farming
March 31, 2025 Ten years ago, Mike Zelkind and Tisha Livingston, both veterans of the food industry, founded 80 Acres Farms in Cincinnati with (mostly) their own money. They began with small container farms and tested different growing factors—lighting, water, automation—before graduating to more integrated systems. Their first brick-and-mortar operation opened in 2017, a quarter-acre, reclaimed building in an industrial corner of the city.
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The vertical farming industry has exploded since then, in more ways than one, with a proliferation of startups and huge cash infusions followed by a recent spate of high-profile failures and cooling interest from investors. 80 Acres, however, has largely kept its head down. In 2025, it seems to be bucking the odds, with back-to-back announcements of $115 million in new funding and the acquisition of a biotech company, plus the expansion of its farm footprint into Georgia, Texas, and Colorado through a separate acquisition of assets from Kalera, Inc. These new businesses join 80 Acres’ three active production farms, including a 200,000-square-foot facility in Florence, Ky.; Infinite Acres, the company’s technology hub and a wholly owned subsidiary based in the Netherlands; the Infinite Acres Field Lab & Experience Center, a research facility in The Hague; and Mother Raw salad dressings, another acquisition from 2024.
But 80 Acres’ founders know they’re not immune to industry growing pains. “It’s going to take everyone in CEA to help solve the big problems,” says Livingston, who now serves as CEO of Infinite Acres. “It’s about transparency, standardization, and working together.”
Adds Zelkind, 80 Acres’ CEO, “We want to lower the barrier of entry for others. We’re not afraid of competition; we think it makes everyone better. But it’s got to be done the right way.”
Starting Small and Partnering on Technology
Zelkind has strong opinions about “the right way.” But first, he and Livingston both acknowledged the major advantage of self-funding as they navigated the early days.
“The industry didn’t help a lot of these entrepreneurs by throwing big money at them,” Zelkind says. “You take these hundreds of millions, and guess what? You have to spend it, because there’s an expectation. And when you do that too early, you build monstrosities that don’t work, and it takes massive dollars to fix each problem. It creates a vicious cycle of having to justify bad things and keep moving forward.”
80 Acres started small via prototype container units; it was the quickest way in and allowed them to build different zones for plants to test multiple variables, keeping capital spending in check while they learned how to grow indoors.
“One of our corporate values is, ‘Fail fast, cheaply, and with tremendous insight,’” Zelkind says. “Once we figured out what worked, then we built slightly larger systems, and then started thinking about how to scale it.”
The methodical process helped the team see what they were really good at, what they weren’t, and what they didn’t know how to do, Livingston says. “We only invented [technology] where we needed to, and otherwise found best-in-class partners from other industries”—Siemens and Philips, for example—“to help us develop systems.”
Three Keys: Tech, Supply Chain, and Product Differentiation
Technology, of course, is critical for vertical farming, since you’re removing weather, sun, and often soil from the growing equation. But the perils of glorifying technology for technology’s sake, at the expense of agricultural know-how and realistic ROI, have been duly discussed in the wake of bankruptcy filings.
Zelkind includes technology when laying out 80 Acres’ philosophy on the three keys to scalable vertical farming success, with the qualifier: “technology that works.”
“Technology is there to grow the highest yield, the widest variety of crops, at the right cost,” he says. “That’s how we define technology that works—and it has to consistently create the highest quality produce. It’s not there to be sexy.”
Many big investors, Zelkind argues, were led to believe that technology was further along in this respect than it actually was 10 years ago. Today, he says, it’s almost there.
“Now is the time to start thinking about it and doubling down, taking all the learnings of the last 10 years and scaling and building out,” he says. “But it takes time. There’s still a lot of really hard work to do.”
With the right technology on board, Zelkind continues, then you turn your attention to the supply chain and establish operations in the right places. But that’s not necessarily the point of consumption.
“This is something many people misunderstood,” he says. “They stuck these facilities in the middle of urban centers and said, ‘Look, I’m right in the middle of it.’ Well, that’s great. But what are you going to do with [your produce]? There are no distribution centers there.”
He adds that labor rates, energy rates, and other efficiency factors all play into choosing locations that make that last mile of the supply chain as efficient as possible.
The third key, after technology and supply chain strategies, is product differentiation.
“This is the biggest problem I see with the whole CEA space,” Zelkind says. “There are a lot of really wonderful pioneers who want to change the world, but they have no experience in the food industry and produce. And every buyer tells them that the most important thing is price. It becomes a race to the bottom.”
To avoid this, your product needs to be a brand—“a consumer promise,” Zelkind says—that offers something specific (quality, freshness, nutrition) that customers value. “Then you can sell products at a fair price, not a high price,” he says. “If you understand consumer behavior and product differentiation, then you can get paid for the work you do, because you’re driving value.
“Everybody thinks this is niche, but it’s not,” Zelkind insists. “We’re in Kroger, we’re in mainstream stores. We’re not selling lettuce for the rich.”
Opening Doors to Collaboration
80 Acres’ relationship with Kroger (which is also headquartered in Cincinnati) speaks to the success of its strategy. “We started in one store and proved we could deliver,” Livingston says, “and then we grew to nine stores, then 30. We did it in a very measured way, making sure we had line of sight in building the infrastructure of the company as we were scaling.” That reach now extends to over 1,000 Kroger stores, as well as other retailers and restaurants, which stock the company’s lettuces, tomatoes, microgreens, herbs, and salad kits.
Most significant of all: 80 Acres’ farm-level unit economics are profitable. The company’s founders are bullish on the future of vertical farming and are eager to collaborate and share what they’ve learned in the name of industry health.
Livingston likes to tell the story of how, when she began her research on the CEA industry, she spent a lot of time with a pepper farmer in the Netherlands. He told her: “When greenhouses were getting started, it was a disaster. Nobody was making any money, everyone was trying to figure it out.”
It wasn’t until the growers began meeting for coffee, talking about crops and the problems they were having, that they found a way to make the industry worthwhile, Livingston says.
“The vertical farming companies that are left are beginning to collaborate, to benchmark,” she says. “We’ve had everybody come visit our farm. Our farm is open—we want people to see it and give us feedback. And we’d love to see their farms, too.”
Zelkind agrees and reiterates the need for patience. “We’re all learning. This is a completely new concept. What industry develops in 10 years from nothing to something, when it’s trying to revolutionize the way we’ve been doing things for 2,000 years?
“It’s going to be incredibly challenging,” he says, “but we think the future is bright.”
Chart courtesy of 80 Acres Farms