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oped by “blockchain of food” startup Ripe.io.
For Ward, having that instantaneous data
at his fingertips is a revelation. “For my whole
life as a farmer, any data I ever got about
nitrogen, which is something you need in the
highest quantity, was gathered by taking a
soil sample, sending it out, and waiting a few
weeks for the results. By which point it was
usually too late to do anything,” he says. “To
have it in real time, it changes everything.”
This is the second year Ward has partnered
with Sweetgreen and Ripe.io to, as the lingo
goes, put his tomatoes on the blockchain.
Sweetgreen, a 95-restaurant salad chain that’s
become a darling of health-conscious urban
lunchers, has installed the sensors in 20 farms
to date. It fronts the tech cost—a few hundred
dollars in Ward’s case—and the farmers use
the data as they see fit. Ward says the technol-
ogy has enabled him to take immediate action
when, say, nitrogen levels are flagging and the
patch needs an intervention, and it provides
feedback that may change the way he fertil-
izes going forward. (Bye-bye, fresh chicken
poop!) The data has also challenged some of
his long-held farmer’s wisdom, like the idea
that tomatoes taste best immediately after
they’re picked (turns out, they actually peak
three to five days later), and confirmed other
beliefs (“Despite anything I can do, when the
temperature drops below 50 degrees at night,
the flavor drops off ”).
or that money shot of mozzarella stretching
from a slice of steaming-hot pizza, the pools of
grease so lubricious they’re practically porno-
graphic. Perhaps that’s why Sweetgreen and
its competitors tend to shun the “S-word”—
“vegetable-forward meals” and “real food” are
their terms of choice. But whether the produce
they serve is leafy and crunchy or roasted and
warm, the goal of the current generation of
greens crusaders is the same: Turn vegetables
into objects of desire.
“When you optimize for flavor, it creates
that stickiness, that craveability. It’s what gets
people to desire the product,” says Nic Jam-
met, one of Sweetgreen’s three cofounders.
He and Nate Ru and Jonathan Neman—the
trio are all 34 years old—met as Georgetown
University undergrads and launched the chain
in 2007. (For more on our 40 Under 40 list,
see page 65.) “We can’t tell people to eat our
food because it’s healthy,” says Jammet. “That’s
never going to work. You should want to eat
Of course, technology has its limits. Ward looks up at the clouds
and shrugs. “The main ingredient is sunlight. That’s one of the
things you guys determined,” he gestures to the four Sweetgreen
employees who have traveled from the company’s Los Angeles
headquarters to check in on the farm, “and that’s one of the things
I can’t control.”
“We’ll get there!” one of them chirps.
B
Y MOST INDICATIONS, THE CONCEPT of salad originated in ancient
Rome, and since then, it’s been largely an ancillary dish,
an opening act to sit through before the main event (often,
a slab of meat) arrives. On the rare occasions that salad is
eaten as an entrée, it’s typically accompanied by a sense of mar-
tyrdom: “I’ll just have a salad.” Salads have long come in myriad
forms, from leafy and green to mayonnaise-y and off-white, but
in recent years, thanks largely to shops like Sweetgreen, they’ve
become increasingly gourmet. Caramelized portobellos instead
of raw button mushrooms, trendy kale instead of iceberg, roasted
sesame tofu instead of ... did the salad shops of yore even
offer tofu?
But salads have never been sexy. They haven’t had their Carl’s Jr.
moment—Paris Hilton gnawing on them on the hood of a Bentley—
PHOTOGRAPHS BY TONY LUONG
