Inside the high-tech farm in New Jersey where Instagram’s favorite strawberries grow

The most delicious strawberries I’d ever tasted were from my grandparents’ garden in Sofia, Bulgaria. They were the size of gummy candies, looked like forest rubies, and tasted like they’d grown in the Swiss Alps. The second-best strawberries were from a vertical farm in New Jersey. They were the color of white peaches, sweet and tender, and picked by a robot.

A 90-minute drive from New York City, next to a sprawling field of solar panels, stands a pale building that a few years ago was a plastics factory. Today, it grows some of the world’s most expensive strawberries.

If you’re a frequent Michelin-starred restaurant goer, or if you shop at Whole Foods on the East Coast, you’ve probably heard of the company. OishiOishii, which means “delicious” in Japanese, first made headlines in 2021 for its expensive strawberries, which at the time cost $50 for a tray of eight. The cost has since dropped to $11-15 depending on the retailer, largely due to Oishii expanding its farming operations.

Until recently, the company grew all of its produce on a vertical farm in Jersey City, New Jersey. But with the opening of its new Amatelas Farm in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, Oishii is on a mission to build a replicable vertical farming model that will help it become a global produce brand. The goal is to tap into people’s rapidly growing appetite for berries—a market that now has enough of the fruit. Grown by over 40% In the past five years.

With the exception of Japan, where premium strawberries can cost up to $780, Oishi’s strawberries are among the most expensive on the market. Oishi plans to offer different grades of strawberries at different prices, so people can choose their level of extravagance based on their preferences. “There are $10 strawberries, there are $20 strawberries, there are $4 strawberries,” John Reed, Oishi’s chief financial officer, told me during a recent visit to the Phillipsburg farm.

Build a plan

In 2015, Hiroki Koga, Oishi’s co-founder and CEO, left his job in Tokyo as a consultant for Deloitte (where he helped large companies implement vertical farms) to get an MBA from UC Berkeley. There, he met agricultural entrepreneur Brendan Somerville, who became Oishi’s co-founder.

Oishi started with a suitcase full of strawberries imported from Japan, a seed round of seed capital, and a small warehouse in New Jersey where the founders often slept and hand-pollinated the strawberry flowers. The opening of the new farm in Phillipsburg marks a significant milestone on the road to global dominance.

Named after the mythical Japanese sun goddess, the Amatelas farm spans more than 237,500 square feet and can grow more than 20 times as many berries as its previous facility in Jersey City (though the company declined to say exactly how many strawberries it can produce). Unlike Oishii’s first farm, the Amatelas farm is entirely solar-powered and recycles 95% of the water it uses. It’s also home to 50 robots that use artificial intelligence and computer vision to capture more than 60 billion data points a year to understand the optimal ripeness of strawberries before they can be picked.

On a humid June day, four robots busied themselves as I watched through a small window. Although I wasn’t allowed into the room where the strawberries were growing, I had to change into clean silk clothes, slip on wooden shoes, don a face mask, gloves and a hairnet, and walk through an “air shower” designed to blast away pesticides and other pollutants.

For a few seconds, the robots seemed confused as they circled around, searching for a ripe target. But one of them quickly zeroed in on a perfectly red strawberry. It opened its metal claws, which looked like jewelers’ pliers, and gently tore the berry from its stem. The robot then turned 90 degrees, dropped the berries into a tray, and once full, they slid away on a conveyor belt to an ice-cold packing room, where packers in all-white uniforms inspected the strawberries one by one and sorted them by size.

The farm has hundreds of shelves, each stacked with eight rows of planters. Instead of roaming robots, the shelves move slowly around the room, almost like a ski lift. Moving the shelves was easier—and safer—than moving the robots, Koga says. After picking the strawberries, the robot “washed its hands” by flapping its claws in a small bowl of water, and went back to fishing. After a few seconds, it realized there were no more ripe strawberries in sight, and the room had gone dark. If it had stayed a little longer, Koga says, it would have seen the entire shelving system start to move.

Farm or laboratory?

Oishi’s indoor farm is designed to mimic the micro-environment of an undisclosed city in the foothills of the Japanese Alps. On my tour, I pass through a cavernous room filled with pipes and some fifty massive water tanks that collect, clean, recycle and redistribute water throughout the system to irrigate the berries. Deep inside the building, I peek inside a “central command unit,” where various charts and numbers (collected from countless sensors around the farm) flash on two wall-mounted screens.

Oishi’s farm is more like a laboratory, but it’s a promising alternative to conventional farms, which require vast tracts of land to grow crops and often use synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to boost yields and preserve produce for long-distance transportation. Unlike outdoor farms, Oishi’s farm is free from heat waves, droughts and disease.

Despite a wave of vertical farms declaring bankruptcy or laying off workers, the global vertical farming market is expected to surpass $35 billion by 2032Growing food on vertical farms, where technology allows farmers to play gods, means companies can, in theory, grow food anywhere, regardless of climate, and do so on a limited patch of land.

That level of control comes at a price. Koga hasn’t said how much it cost to develop the farm, but the company recently raised $134 million in Series B funding. Along with all the robots, sensors, and machinery that make Amatillas Farm work, the facility is also home to dozens of farmers, who spend up to six months learning about Japanese farming practices, as well as a number of (also undisclosed) bees that fly around the farm.

The robots work day and night, 24/7, all year round, and for that reason, they easily steal the spotlight. But according to Reed, the bees are the real stars. “If the bees weren’t there, you wouldn’t get any fruit,” he says.

Oishi is the first American company to figure out how to use indoor pollinators, and thus how to grow strawberries on vertical farms. (For these reasons, other vertical farms in the U.S. grow mostly leafy greens and herbs, while Driscoll’s, which controls about 60 percent of the U.S.’s organic strawberries, grows them on conventional farms.)

The team declined to reveal the exact details, but Koga says it took them a year to figure out how to “communicate” with the bees. Bees are “not stupid,” he says, and they needed to be coaxed out of their hives into a sunless environment. It then took them another three to four years to increase their pollination success rates from 40-50% at the start to the 95% they are today.

I didn’t see any bees during my visit, but it’s strange to imagine that this is a place where humans, bees and robots work together, like citizens of a small community working towards the same goal: growing fresh, clean, ripe fruits and vegetables – all year round.

Beyond Strawberries

From the very beginning of Oishi’s venture, Koga recognized the untapped potential of strawberries, which have 148 registered varieties in Japan and only about a dozen in the United States. As a savvy businessman, he also recognized the berry’s marketing power. “It’s hard to build a brand with lettuce,” he says.

Koga has long described strawberries as the “holy grail” of fruits, but bees, while not new to Amatillas Farm, are a testament to the company’s quest to go beyond strawberries. Third The crops we eat—including apples, bananas and potatoes—need pollinators to grow, so as Oishi figured out the basics of how to grow strawberries on a vertical farm, he also figured out how to grow other produce. “Our goal is to launch a product that is many times better than conventional produce, at the same price as conventional produce,” Koga says of the company’s future.

But before the company can do that, and replicate its vertical farming operations in other parts of the United States, it needs to get the plan right. For Reed, the strategy has been twofold—plant better, and breed better varieties—while simultaneously opening both arms. From the start, Oishi has refined its “growth recipe” based on about 20 inputs, including light, temperature, humidity, CO2 levels, pH levels, and airflow speed (to mimic wind, which helps distribute pollen).

“Outdoors, you can’t test, you can’t say, ‘Well, what if it’s a little bit cooler next year?’ So we can learn from what we do each time to grow better strawberries,” Reed says. While the team will continue to operate their old Jersey City farm, they’re also using their first farm in Kearny as a breeding and R&D lab where they’re constantly refining their breeding recipes, as well as testing and growing new varieties of strawberries and other produce. In December 2023, Oishii introduced a cherry tomato that’s as sweet as candy and costs $9.99 for a tray of 11 tomatoes. And at their breeding lab in Kearny, New Jersey, they’re already experimenting with watermelons. “The goal is to grow everything,” Koga says.

Oishi has more production planned, and several more farms are in the works, but Koga did not say when or where they would open. For now, the company is eager to see what it can learn from Amatlas, and how it can transfer those lessons to the next farm, and the next, and the next.