A Japanese entrepreneur may have grown the sweetest and tastiest strawberries ever
Oishii runs the largest vertical farm in the world
Oishii was founded by a former Japanese vertical farm consultant Hiroki Koga. This New Jersey-based company is looking for ways to make the sweetest and tastiest strawberries ever.
Koga initially moved from Japan to the US in 2015 to study in an MBA program at UC Berkeley. Not long after he moved, he was buying groceries at the local market when he noticed that, while American strawberries looked “shiny and big and delicious,” they were actually “watery and lacked flavor.”
In 2017, Koga graduated and met Brendan Somerville, a recent MBA grad from UCLA, who became the co-founder of Oishii. They decided to join forces and build vertical strawberry farms.
Having established the initial distribution networks with major retailers like Whole Foods, their strawberries sold out extremely quickly, however, they still decided to decrease the price to $20 per box, so as to make healthy food more accessible to the general public.
According to Koga, Oishii’s largest vertical farm in New Jersey is also the largest of its kind in the world. It stands at 74,000 square feet.
