Just Vertical

When Kevin Jakiela and Conner Tidd met as students in the University of Toronto Mississauga’s Master of Science in Sustainability Management program, both were working on research-driven projects about environmental issues and food production. Tidd completed an internship at a large agricultural corporation, analyzing their public relations strategies in light of increasing concern from environmentalists. Jakiela had conducted research for a vertical farming company, determining best practices for growing seedlings indoors. Their combined expertise from these placements lay the foundation for their belief in vertical hydroponic gardening—both as a viable business opportunity, and as a means to grow produce year-round, with fewer adverse environmental impacts.

In the summer of 2016, Jakiela and Tidd began pooling their knowledge to found Just Vertical, a start-up creating products for consumer-friendly indoor vertical gardening. Before moving to a mass-market scale, however, they built their knowledge base by working with Growing North (now known as Green Iglu), a non-profit organization devoted to building greenhouses in Northern communities. After Growing North erected its first hydroponic garden inside a geodesic dome in Naujaat, Nunavut in 2015, Jakiela and Tidd lent their expertise to support high school students in maintaining their new local greenhouse, and drew on their technical experience with irrigation and lighting to streamline Growing North’s building process for future projects throughout the region.

Jakiela and Tidd’s work in Northern communities highlighted the widespread and growing nature of food insecurity. As a result, Just Vertical encourages consumers to decrease their reliance on the fluctuations of global food supply by maintaining stable hydroponics at home.

Since shifting focus to a mass-market scale, Just Vertical has been creating products with a simple premise: small edible plants growing from vertical supports arranged in columns, lit by LED lights, and watered through an internal irrigation system. Since founding the company, Jakiela and Tidd have created a series of these planters—some of which can be found supplying UTM’s cafeterias—with increasing refinement and success. Their first hydroponic systems were built using pragmatic, hardware-store supplies. After completing further market studies, they found prospective buyers were looking for a growing system that doubled as décor in their living space, rather than the do-it-yourself approach associated with most hydroponics.

Just Vertical’s flagship product, the Aeva, addresses these desires: it’s a growing tower which includes a walnut base with a storage cabinet, lights across the centre, and two columns of planters running up each side. The Aeva pumps water to the roots of each plant directly, forgoing the need for a regular watering schedule. Owners can buy plant nutrients and seeds tailored to their diet on a subscription basis, ensuring ease of use for even the least green-thumbed. As Just Vertical’s marketing materials are keen to point out, the Aeva’s sleek design fits neatly into modern homes and condos.

Tidd characterizes their customers as “people living in cities and urban centres who want to grow their own food but cannot due to living in an urban jungle. At the same time, they want a simple, mess-free, elegant solution that they can show off.”

Beyond Aeva’s polished design, Just Vertical has serious ecological aspirations for its products. The company hopes to reduce food miles (the distance traveled, and resulting pollution involved in shipping food) by encouraging consumers to grow their own greens, herbs, and vegetables. Their goal is to eliminate eight billion food miles before the eight-billionth person is born onto the planet. If this goal seems ambitious, it’s equalled by market enthusiasm for Just Vertical’s product offerings to date: the company has won awards at several sustainability tradeshows, and their first major production run of Aeva units has recently shipped to consumers. In addition, Just Vertical continues to create custom solutions for larger growers, including a recent 28,000 plant facility in London, Ontario.

Amid booming interest for domestic hydroponic products—owing in no small part to the recent legalization of cannabis, but also to increasingly turbulent food prices—Just Vertical enters the market at a challenging time. Home hydroponic kits of all shapes and sizes are available online, many of which use “smart home” technologies offering app-based monitoring of grow lamps and watering schedules. For Jakiela and Tidd, the Aeva’s design-forward approach is one way their product stands out from its competitors. Equally important, however, is their rigorously scientific approach; Tidd asserts that the Aeva can grow larger plants, in greater quantities, faster than other systems.

A persistent and legitimate concern about home hydroponic systems is their reliance on power, and the resulting strain on the electricity grid—the energy needed to grow hydroponics is only as ecologically friendly as the grid powering it. In response to these concerns, the Aeva uses high-efficiency LED lights and a single pump, resulting in a low power draw. Beyond energy efficiency alone, Tidd is quick to point out the other offsets created by home hydroponic gardening: “When we look at the emissions saved, some of the big things we look at are the packaging we eliminate—by being right in your kitchen, no packaging is needed—and savings on last-mile transit. If we can save you one trip to the grocery store per week, that takes miles off the road.” Even if gardening with the simplicity of solar energy alone will never lose its appeal, the broader ecological impacts of vertical hydroponics have undeniable rewards.

By reintroducing gardening into improbable places, Just Vertical empowers consumers to reclaim some agency in their food consumption. Jakiela and Tidd learned of the adverse environmental impacts of food production first-hand, through their diverse research experience at agricultural corporations, hydroponic start-ups, and in Northern communities. Informed by issues such as crop failure and scarcity, emissions from food miles, and the waste of food packaging, they saw potential in vertical hydroponic gardening as a sustainable alternative to large-scale agricultural industry. After developing several successful growing systems, they turned their attention to marketing and design—discovering that consumers are not afraid to highlight their elegantly designed hydroponics. This last arc in their trajectory is a crucial one: the increasing popularity of indoor gardening systems in living rooms and kitchens emphasizes that food is not simply grown out there, but is an integral part of our everyday lives requiring attention and care.