A Dubai hotel has taken a major step in sustainably sourcing ingredients at its in-house diners by setting up a vertical hydroponic farm on the site itself.
The level of carbon footprint and transport prices of the customers is reduced if the product will be grown inside the premises.
Tobias Pfister, the property’s executive chef, stated, “We are doing it for two causes. A chef will always want the freshest and best ingredients, and the necessity to think of sustainability is huge.”
He further said that there is a need for everyone to reduce their carbon footprints. The food is grown inside the premises and then is freshly made and served on the tables.
“There is no logistics or transportation involved. I can actually go in the morning to the farm and harvest the lettuce and have it in a salad bowl during lunchtime.”
In a vertical farming method, crops are grown in layers on top of each other, while hydroponics is the process of growing products in nutrient-rich liquid instead of soil.
The farm stretches about 40 square metres and is inside a sealed container inside the property grounds in Dubai Marina.
Plants, including kale, lettuce, rosemary, basil and thyme, will be grown all year.
He also stated that food security was ignored due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Ritz-Carlton’s vertical farm was made in partnership with a hydroponics specialist, Green Container Advanced Farming.
This method is usually said to be a solution to the long-term problem of finding places to farm in quickly urbanising areas.
AeroFarms, the US-based vertical farm company, broke its ground on a research and development centre in the capital, Abu Dhabi, last year.
The 8200 square-metre facility is part of a plan worth $150 million by the Abu Dhabi Investment Office to bring out cutting-edge technology to the forefront of efforts to enhance food security.
Moreover, Sokovo, an agricultural technology company, disclosed it was constructing a 92000 square metre vertical farm in Dubai Industrial City.