Automated lettuce farm delivers crops directly to supermarkets

“A fully automated lettuce farm in Norway is delivering lettuce to supermarket shelves.…No one touches the lettuce from the moment it is sown until the customer opens it at home,” notes The Doomslayer.

“Norway’s first fully automated facility for vegetable production was put into operation last fall. This spring, the first products hit store shelves…’In this facility, no one touches the lettuce from the time it is sown, grown and packaged until it ends up on the store shelf and is finally opened by the customer at home in their kitchen,'” says SINTEF researcher Ottar Bakås.

The facility is operated by Himmelgrønt AS, a joint venture between the supermarket chain Coop Norge and the tech firm Avisomo. It is based in Gardermoen, not far from the Norwegian capital of Oslo. The supermarket chain said its “location enables the company to distribute goods quickly and efficiently to all the chain’s stores around the country.”

“It is still common for many tasks to be done by people, but technology has evolved to the point where we can automate manual tasks,” says Aleksander Lillienskiold.

The venture engages in “vertical farming”: “indoor farming in a controlled environment where crops are grown in stacked layers.”

“Growing indoors makes it possible to produce crops year-round. This means we don’t need to import from abroad. And there are no pesticides or insects, so when the lettuce is ready for harvest, it can just be cut and bagged right away,” Lillienskiold explains.

A news article says that in Avisomo’s facility, “robots and automation carry out all the tasks. Light, air and water are automatically adjusted to create the best possible growing conditions. The vegetables are grown in a multilevel shelf system. One seed is placed in a unit, and the roots grow downward, where they have good access to nutrients via flowing water. The plant grows on top. Within just over two weeks, the fastest-growing lettuces are ready for harvest.”

Robots are being used for food preparation in restaurants, such as the salad-making robot used by the Sweetgreen restaurant chain.

The FDA has approved a robot to draw people’s blood.

Robots with artificial intelligence are spreading on Japanese farms. On some American farms, there are drones with artificial intelligence, and robots that use artificial intelligence to kill 100,000 weeds per hour.

Robot waiters are increasingly being used in South Korean restaurants, which are facing a labor shortage.