Manufacturing

Reimagining the food industry

It is a tantalizing prospect. Healthy food produced sustainably and efficiently and grown close to large population centers. Fresh, nutritious, and flavorful food that is good for people and the planet.

This is the aim of Planet Farms. The business, founded in Milan in 2018, is seeking to transform how fresh vegetables are grown, sold, and distributed. Its vertical farming model is a purpose-built factory environment where produce can be farmed in tightly controlled conditions. Compared to traditional methods, this model can produce more food in a smaller space, using 95 percent less water and no pesticides. It does this around the clock, throughout the year, is fully traceable, and part of a completely integrated supply chain.

"We grow the crops in ‘white rooms,’ which are basically an environment that has very low levels of airborne particles," says Massimo Mistretta, Chief Information and Security Officer (CISO), Planet Farms. "This means we can grow food without using any types of pesticide, and where all the resources needed are controlled at source."

For now, Planet Farms is producing salad leaves under the Frescaah brand. Its 20,000 square meter facility at Cirimido, near Como, supplies a significant share of grocers in Italy, along with supermarkets in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the UK. The company’s R&D team is exploring the production of an increasing number of plants including coffee, and cotton.

To operate profitably, and build the long-term business case, Planet Farms wants to create new levels of farming industry efficiency. Its model is highly automated, data-driven, and tech-dependent.

"The farm is a network," says Mistretta. "It comprises multiple people, processes, and systems. Everything must be integrated. It needs a centralized operational brain."

Reliable network performance is critical. Every aspect of the Planet Farms process, from growing to procurement, order, contracts, and packaging, depends on the connectivity.

Seamless roaming and low latency to drive robotic processes

For Planet Farms, the transformation of the farming industry is being built on Cisco Ultra-Reliable Wireless Backhaul (URWB).

"Our first factory prototype used a traditional industrial wireless system, which created issues with latency and roaming," Mistretta explains. "By moving to URWB, we resolved those issues, and our operations and IT teams now have peace of mind."

Cisco URWB delivers extremely low latency (often less than 10 milliseconds), making it suitable for real-time control applications, such as robotic pickers and tele-remote operations. With every aspect of the Planet Farms operation being monitored continuously, URWB supports the high data rates necessary for applications such as 3D image transfer across a hybrid cloud architecture in a highly reliable way. Planet Farms’ 3D cameras generate terabytes of data per day.

Like any traditional factory, the Como site is a hive of constant movement. The Cisco network allows consistent and reliable connectivity for assets as they move around the 20,000 square meter space, without significant packet loss during handoffs between access points.

"Our environment is highly challenging for wireless networks, with a dense grid of steel, humidity, and low temperatures," says Mistretta. "URWB keeps our AGVs and cameras collecting crucial data in real-time without interruption. This data is vital for advanced AI models to make informed decisions. We’re able to provide connectivity across the whole site with a much lower number of wireless devices than previously needed, and with much better performance and a level of reliability that allows us to operate with greater confidence."

The use of Cisco URWB is part of a wider engagement with Cisco. Planet Farms already uses Cisco Industrial Ethernet and is exploring Cisco Cyber Vision to strengthen network protection.

"In order to grow our biological material, we need computational capabilities. Cisco is the glue that connects those two worlds," says Mistretta.

Reliable connectivity simplifies global expansion

Reliable, site-wide connectivity underpins process efficiency across the Como site. Relentless automation enables Planet Farms to manage a factory twice the size as before, with a significant reduction in staff dedicated to repetitive tasks.

"There are an increasing number of benefits when you look at our ability to integrate new monitoring tools," Mistretta points out. "Those tools provide a picture of what is happening on the floor in real time, with a level of detail we didn’t have before. URWB consistently delivers very low latency helping make this possible."

The network carries real-time data from every corner of the operation. This enables robotic process automation and the use of agentic AI. Gaia VF is a purpose-built AI enhanced process automation system that documents the entire journey, from seed to shelf. Planet Farms has four tech teams (IT, agronomy, R&D, and automation), all of which have different highly demanding requirements on connectivity and real-time data distribution and processing.

Planet Farms is in the process of building two new factories: one in the UK and one in the Nordics. "There is clearly an opportunity for the concept to be global. Our goal is to go beyond Europe, becoming a global player and most likely a leader," Mistretta explains.

Fertile ground for innovation

The Cisco engagement creates a foundation for continued innovation.

While the two new factories will closely resemble the Como template, Mistretta says it is important that the company continues to innovate its processes. The Planet Farms model, he adds, need not be 20,000 square meter factories (it has a smaller site, producing exclusively for a top tier starred restaurant in Italy), but size does matter in creating economies of scale. Future farms could be smaller but still deliver the same quantities due to yield, structural, and process efficiency evolutions.

"The factory is an organism, not a machine. It evolves over time," says Mistretta.