Instafarm - KI Awardees

My name is Philip Hartman. I'm the president of Instafarm and super excited to share about our product and so honored that we were awarded the 2026 Kitchen Innovation Award for our new commercial Instafarm. We've had our consumer product on the market for a couple of years now, and are now going into commercial. Growing of microgreens, herbs, and more plants to come. So I want to tell you a little bit about our product and how this can help food service professionals increase efficiency and reduce costs and improve the overall quality of their offering to their customers. So our whole idea is, you know, this farm to table movement is huge and super. Exciting because it's helping local farmers, it's helping with efficiency, it's helping with these sort of things. We're taking that to the next level by bringing the farm right into the kitchen, hyperlocal produce right there where it's going to be consumed. This reduces all sorts of costs as well as inefficiencies that go on in terms of your uh Supply chain, and also it helps with a great end product that's healthy and fresh and less waste for the customer. So, this is the commercial Insta farm. What you do is the trays come pre-filled the soil and seeds, you literally pop the lid off the tray. These are new trays, as you can see up here, and then you can typically harvest microgreens, wheat grass, or the different herbs or plants that we're working on in about 7 days, depending upon the plant. So, this is micro. Cabbage, and this is ready to be harvested right now. This is probably around 6 days old, and as you can see, just beautiful microgreens, and all you have to do is you place it in there, it grows it, it detects it, it's got cameras in there, it's got sensors in there. It's looking at the environmental conditions and all these different factors to make sure that you're getting optimal growth every single time you pull it out, you harvest it, and then the trays are actually fully compostable. These will turn back to soil in about 45 days and you put it right. Into the compost. So what does this do for a food service professional? Well, A, this reduces waste. Greens like microgreens are very low on the shelf life, and oftentimes 15, we've heard as much as 40% are going right into the trash bin because they just wilt so quickly, they don't last very long. Well, they're able to be super fresh, super local, so you reduce waste, but also, it reduces costs. Uh, we're seeing about an 8 month ROI. On this machine, it pays for itself in about 8 months, based upon your average restaurant's use, from what we're seeing in the industry compared to buying microgreens. So, it cuts costs, cuts waste, and improves the quality of the product. So you have these super tasty, super fresh greens, you know, the fresher they're gonna be, the healthier they're gonna be, and also the better they're gonna taste for the end customer, as well as it's just beautiful, right? Like, what restaurant doesn't want plants growing and living right there in a restaurant. So, we're super excited about offering this at the show. You can come by, we're gonna have 2 of these units at the show. We'd love to have you stop by and use them. We can show you how it works. Takes a combination, like I said, there's sensors and cameras in there, and then this robotic gantry moves over each tray, and one of the really cool things about this is you can swap this gantry, the robot in less than 1 minute. So, if there's ever an issue where for whatever reason, something goes wrong on it, you can swap it out, you'll have a spare on hand. And so, it makes it super efficient so that there's 24/7 uptime. No tools are needed, you literally pop it out, very easy for you to swap it. One of the other cool things is this is one of the, the cutting edge energy efficiency. So, we're only talking about 40 watts of power. This is like literally running a MacBook sort of power to grow up to 36 trays. These are what the trays look like. And you can grow about 5 of these trays every single day, and so you can produce a lot of greens right there in your kitchen for your customers. Super excited to have you at the show and show you more of a product there.

We're gonna have 2 of these commercial units at the restaurant show. One is gonna be in the award area for the Kitchen Innovation Awards. One is gonna be at our booth, and we'd love to have you stop by and see how it works, right? It's beautiful to look at, very easy to use. Let me show you some of the features that we're gonna be showcasing at the show for folks to see. First off, this thing is self-contained, so the only thing that you need is a typical 110 plug-in. And you plug it into the back of the unit. Then the water actually goes down here. There's a drawer. All you do is you pull this out, you wheel it over the sink, you fill it up, and you put it back in. So you can see those features right there. You can also check out the robot. We'll do a demo of how to, to remove a robot and replace it in under 1 minute, so you can check that out. We'll have tons of plants. So, if you're a chef and you want to come get some plants for one of your, your cooking demos, Let us know. We would love to supply you with microgreens. We're gonna have tons of microgreens and wheatgrass and all sorts of different stuff ready to go there. And so you can see how the robot works, you can see how the lighting works, you can look, look at how the sensors are detecting, is there a tray or not a tray, and how much water that needs. All of that's gonna be there. We're gonna have some of our experts on the product design side there at the show, ready to explain the different features of this product.

So for us, the 2026 show represents the launch of this product. We announced it only in January. We've got a lot of excitement from the industry, and we're just starting to deliver products to customers this spring. And so, who would we like to connect to the show? Well, if you, if you have a, a restaurant or a hospitality group, uh, or hotels, uh, even, for example, like yachts and cruise lines have expressed interest because they can put these on their boats. Well, if you're interested in fresh screen. At your location, whatever that location is, even corporate food service or contract food service, we would love to talk to you and see how we could help you produce hyperlocal, super fresh organic greens for your customers. So, we're here really to get pre-orders for this unit, so we can start shipping this unit out to as many customers as possible. We're here to connect with folks who may be partnership opportunities and to help people understand the value that this can bring to their organization.