Reducing the economic barriers to local food production.
Nearly 75% of vertical farming operations today aren't profitable. Energy and labor account for up to 75% of vertical farming production costs. That needs to change.
We are driven to reduce economic barriers to local, commercial-scale food production.
Two engineers, one stubborn question.
As past coworkers in mechanical engineering design for industrial applications, Grayden Wiebe and Renaud Pelletier sat down in early 2025 to ask: "Why does the indoor farming industry have continually stunted growth?"
The more they learned about the state of the industry, the more they discovered the problem was rooted in an economics problem very close to their engineering backgrounds: energy and labor.
Renaud, with over 35 years of experience in engineering design, teamed up with Grayden — finishing an MSc in Energy System Engineering — to form Grow Below Systems. The goal: leverage engineering principles to reduce energy and labor costs, and increase the viability of local food production.
portrait coming soon
The problem behind the failures.
Behind the big-name failures and the little ones lives a core issue: growing plants indoors takes a lot of energy. For systems so dependent on energy, little has been done to reduce consumption — only incremental component upgrades over time.
The major contributors to energy use are lighting and environmental control. Drawing from their engineering expertise, Renaud and Grayden began designing solutions for this problem. Their vision: a world where local food production — even in the most challenging places — is more than possible.