More flavor, fewer miles

While CEO Gary Lazarski may come from a legal and financial background, and not a long line of tomato growers, his business know-how helped him to find the right people to launch a successful hydroponic tomato operation near Chicago this past year. MightyVine, a 7.5 acre tomato greenhouse operation under glass located in Rochelle, Ill. completed construction in the summer of 2015, with the first plants started in August and the first tomatoes harvested in October. According to a press release from the company, they will “harvest daily, supplying the Midwest market with 4.5 million pounds of tomatoes, 52 weeks a year.”

From ethanol to tomatoes

Lazarski initially became familiarized with greenhouses after purchasing an ethanol plant with business partner and fellow investor, Jim Murphy, in 2009. As ethanol plants give off CO₂ — a valuable resource for plants that can increase yields — as a waste product, many growers in the Netherlands take advantage of it by building next to ethanol plants and funneling in the waste CO₂. Waste heat can also be funneled into a greenhouse for year-round growing in colder climates.

Although they considered locations near ethanol plants when looking for a home for MightyVine, the investors ended up deciding against building a greenhouse there due to economic reasons and increased plant efficiencies (i.e. not enough waste heat and CO₂ to be justify the investment). “But we still loved the idea of building a greenhouse, so we eventually said, ‘Let’s just raise the money and build a greenhouse,’” says Lazarski. And so MightyVine was born.

Why the Midwest?

With many location options in the U.S., why did MightyVine choose the Midwest and, more specifically, Rochelle, located about 80 miles west of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile? “We knew that, based on our research, it would really work in Chicago to have a locally grown tomato available year-round to sell into the local market,” Lazarski says. Rochelle is a small town of fewer than 10,000 people, but “they punch above their weight in terms of business,” he says. “For a small town, they've got great infrastructure, fantastic leadership, and they're very encouraging to new businesses.”

Providing a year-round supply of locally grown, flavorful, vine-ripened tomatoes is the most important part of MightyVine’s mission. “We wanted to be an Illinois-grown tomato, partly because Chicago is, I think, the largest underserved market in the Midwest due to its population size and the fact that we import a vast quantity of our produce to the Chicago market,” Lazarski says.

Being close to a major population center allows them to quickly move ripe produce from the greenhouse to the retailer or restaurant, and enables them to grow tomatoes that aren’t ideal for long-distance shipping, but are more flavorful. MightyVine currently grows Roterno slicer tomatoes, and Robinio cherry tomatoes and fully ripens them on the vine for high nutritional value and flavor. “Those were selected after consulting with our Dutch partners based on their flavor characteristics,” Lazarski says. “The main thing we're trying to [use to] differentiate ourselves from the rest of the market in Chicago is that we are locally grown and we're grown for flavor.”

The bulk of MightyVine’s tomatoes are sold in the Chicago market, but they plan to move into nearby areas such as Milwaukee, Madison, the Quad Cities (four counties in northwest Illinois and southeastern Iowa) downstate Illinois and other cities “within a reasonable day’s drive,” says Lazarski. “I think people in Chicago generally have a pretty expansive view of what’s considered ‘local.’”

Their main customers at this point are Jewel Food Stores in Chicago, Whole Foods in the Midwest region, and Local Foods — a distribution network they created. Local Foods was developed at the same time as MightyVine by the minds behind the tomato operation and is meant to be a “distributor of locally sourced foods into the Chicago restaurant and retail market,” according to Lazarski. Local Foods has a 17,000-square-foot retail space in the city that sells fresh meats, dairy products, produce and dry goods, although the business is primarily focused on servicing more than 300 local restaurants in the area.

Know your strengths and weaknesses

Lazarski is the first to admit that when he and Murphy first started tossing around the idea of opening a greenhouse, they knew they would have to hire people with more expertise in produce growing than they possessed. However, past business experience with the ethanol plant purchase taught them how to find knowledgeable people to take the helm. “Neither my partner nor I knew how to run an ethanol plant,” Lazarski says. “But we were good at identifying people who were very good at that, but who needed people who could raise the money and do what we do — raise the money [and] do all the legal documentation.”

When it came to finding more specialized labor, such as a head grower, Lazarski and Murphy tapped into existing business contacts in the Netherlands, such as Frank Van Kleef, a principal at of Royal Pride Holland, a Dutch tomato grower and MightyVine partner. Van Kleef and other contacts led them to produce professionals like COO Nic Helderman and grower Willem Doelman, both of Dutch origin. “We developed relationships with these guys,” Lazarski says. “They were very patient and worked with us to educate us about the market, [too].”

Keeping it sustainable

In the interest of being environmentally conscious, MightyVine’s greenhouses employ a rainwater and snow recapturing system, a hydroponic system that uses 10 percent of the water of field-grown tomatoes, and the company is actively seeking out other ways to reduce its carbon footprint. Because of the nature of growing year-round in the Midwest, they consume more energy to power their high pressure sodium supplemental lighting and heating system in the coldest months of the year. “We’re working with the city … [and] investigating some ways to use CHP, combined heat and power, where we would be able to produce electricity and sell it back to the grid,” Lazarski says. With regards to switching to LED lights to reduce their energy usage, Lazarski says they’re “keeping an eye on that market and certainly want to try and use the energy LEDs as soon as they’re viable,” but that for now, the existing lighting has been sufficient.

It’s exciting to be at the forefront of the movement where the demand for local food has made the need for greenhouses much greater than it was, say, five or 10 years ago in the U.S.” — Gary Lazarski, CEO, MightyVine

The future of MightyVine

While the Roterno and Robinio tomatoes have helped MightyVine find success so far, the company is looking into other possibilities to expand their selection for chefs and retailers. “Every year our grower will work with our seed providers to plant various test varietals, and we will bring those test varietals out to the market and see what kind of reception they get,” Lazarski says. “If we get a very good reception, we will look at what kind of yield we [got], any complications with growing it in terms of pests or crop disease. If it’s a feasible crop for us to grow and it’s got good demand, we’ll go ahead and plant more of that in our next round.”

The property that MightyVine sits on has enough space to double, triple or quadruple the growing area, says Lazarski. “We have both the room and the desire to expand,” he says. “We wanted to walk before we run.”