This Tiny Device Can Grow Your Salad Ingredients in 20 Days
SproutsIO has been used by top chefs as a compact way to grow specialty ingredients faster. Now it’s coming to home cooks.
LED lights that use half the energy of an incandescent bulb come in red, yellow, and blue. All three are programmed to pulsate in “disco mode.”
Photographer: Pippa Drummond for Bloomberg Businessweek. Prop stylist: Aja Coon
The produce space is shrinking. SproutsIO, a device that resembles an old-school iMac G4 with swooping overhead light, is the brainchild of architect Jennifer Broutin Farah. She came up with the idea for a compact, veggie-growing device while working on rooftop gardens for the New York City Parks Department, then developed a scaled-down model for her MIT master’s program.
For the past 18 months, SproutsIO has been used in such restaurants as Boston’s Menton, owned by James Beard-winning chef Barbara Lynch, and the Michelin-starred NoMad in New York. It weighs only about 12 pounds, so chefs can carry it into the dining room to garnish a dish tableside.