Carl Gupton: Greenswell Growers

Eat It, Virginia!

There's a greenhouse in Goochland growing some of the freshest lettuce in town.

Greenswell Growers hopes its hydroponically-grown greens can solve a grocery store concern for some shoppers.

"We've all been in the grocery store picked up that package of greens and seen that wet, nasty tray in the bottom of it and put it back on the shelf and said, I'm not eating that," Greenswell Growers president Carl Gupton said on the Eat It, Virginia podcast. "The reason is that that was harvested three, four, five, six days ago at a minimum. It's harvested, cool chain there [California or Arizona], traveled across the country, hit a distribution center. It's not just a problem of fresh produce, they've got drought. We've all seen the mega droughts going on in California. It's changing the way that we are consuming. Throw COVID on top of it and the supply chain is broken in a lot of ways for our food system. We talk with some of our food distributors and when they order from the West Coast, they don't know if they're getting 100% of their order, 75% or 50% of their order. What we can do is bring predictable supply and have a product ready for them on demand with a predictable supply model and we know it's good, clean, healthy, fresh produce. That's our goal."

You can find Greenswell Growers at several Richmond-area restaurants and at stores like Food Lion and at Harris Teeter stores in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads.

"Hampton Roads has really embraced our product. Richmond has as well," Gupton said. "But we're seeing a lot of movement out in the beach communities, whether it's Outer Banks, whether it's Virginia Beach, or Ocean City through Performance Food Group."

Learn more about Greenswell Growers and the process they go through to bring fresh greens from the greenhouse to the table on this week's Eat It, Virginia podcast.

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