Founded: 2009

Farm Locations: Brooklyn and Queens. Outside of New York City locations include Providence, Rhode Island, Baltimore, Maryland, Chicago, Illinois, and Denver, Colorado

Farm Details: Rooftop hydroponic farms 

Example of Crops Grown: Arugula, Butterhead lettuce, Crispy Green Leaf, Green Oak Leaf, Romaine, Tropicana Green Leaf, Ugly Greens, Basil. They also use their greens to produce dressings and sauces! 

Where to Buy: Whole Foods Market, Fairway Market, Key Foods, Westside Market, Shoprite, Shop Fair Supermarket, Foodtown 

Vision: We are farmers that live in apartments. We see green fields where others see gray. We fuel blooming communities where others fear urban decay. And we grow the freshest produce on earth. Most of all we know that the crunch of fresh, local, sustainably-grown food sets off a chain reaction of good things in the world. We are Gotham Greens and we grow the most extraordinarily fresh food in extraordinarily fresh places.

Sustainability Backstory: Gotham Greens farms can be seen atop buildings in Brooklyn and Queens. While many hydroponic farms are indoors, away from natural sunlight, Gotham Greens’s hydroponic greenhouses are full of ample light. They also utilize renewable energy to power their operations which consume 95% less water and 97% less land than traditional farming methods. 

Like other urban farms, Gotham Greens is acutely aware of the current broken food supply chain. Presently, in order to get fresh produce, people are reliant on it being transported from far away. As the COVID-19 pandemic began, the United States faced immediate supply chain shortages. In an interview with Forbes, Gotham Greens’s CEO Viraj Puri said that the pandemic has exacerbated a growing problem. “It was a real opportunity for us with our shortened supply chain to fill some of those voids...The supply chain is too long, too fragmented. By building these regional, climate-controlled greenhouses, we can produce consistently and reliably year-round” (Sorvino, 2020). In Gowanus, Brooklyn they have a 20,000 square foot hydroponic greenhouse on top of a Whole Foods Market which creates a direct farm to store pipeline.