Plenty is rethinking its growth strategy.
The indoor agriculture startup backed by high-profile tech executives — including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos — has canceled plans to open a major Seattle-area farm, GeekWire learned this week. Plenty said it changed plans because the Kent, Wash., facility could no longer accommodate its next-generation vertical farm. The company is continuing to grow in its home state of California but has no plans in the immediate future to launch a farm in Washington.
Related story: Plenty announces plan to pen farm in Los Angeles
“We decided that the best course of action would be to hibernate Seattle,” said Christina Ra, Plenty’s senior director of integrated marketing.
In the two years since announcing plans to build a 100,000 square-foot vertical farm in the Seattle region, Plenty developed Tigris, a new facility near its San Francisco headquarters. Tigris is too tall to fit in the Kent facility that Plenty leased in 2017, according to Ra.
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