Have you ever been served a salad at a restaurant with shriveled and wilted leaves or taken that bag of lettuce home from the grocery store only to find it mushy and slimy after a few days in the refrigerator? This is a sign of the times because our food travels an average of 1500 miles, for days bouncing around in an eighteen wheeler freight truck before it arrives at your plate in some state of decomposition. It is no secret that produce is “engineered” for shelf life, picked before ripe, and treated with chemicals to control ripening or prevent decomposition. This perverse food system has pushed the priorities of taste, nutrition, and sustainability to the distant background.   

Instead, imagine that your salad was locally and sustainably grown by the chef at your restaurant and was cut from its roots the same day you ate it. Now imagine how fresh, crisp, nutritious, and vibrant the taste would be! This is how we all should eat someday. Urbana Greens is working to make this a large scale and impactful reality.

Our mission is to provide you with absolute control over what, how, and when you grow your food. Our farms are available for your business or organization without the logistics of ownership and maintenance. Having your own farm is the pinnacle of culinary zeal and your clients will know that you put them above everything else.

This service relationship allows the client/chef to know the farmer, visit the farm, understand the entire production process, remove inventory uncertainty, and completely customize what produce to grow. Our farms utilize controlled environment greenhouses and hybrid hydroponic methods that allow for year round production that outperforms conventional farming by 10-20 times. Our farm systems are extremely sustainable utilizing 90% less water, conserving fertilizer resources, and averting agricultural runoff pollution. Salad greens and herbs will be delivered “living” (rootball intact) which will maximize freshness, nutrition, taste and shelf life. Root intact produce can be “harvested” (cut) minutes before consumption which is an offering rarely experienced by diners. Whenever possible, renewable energy technologies such as solar, wind, and bio-gas will be utilized. Any unused food will be donated to food pantry networks. Compostable waste will be allocated to composting programs. Additionally, in some circumstances, aquaponics (symbiotic fish and produce production) systems would be feasible.

We believe that food should be locally produced, pesticide free, and sustainably grown. Everybody wants the freshest, tastiest, and most nutritious food but the origins of our food are far too often a mystery.