Little Leaf Farms’ CEO on Building an Indoor Ag Business

From AgFunderNews:    If you grocery shop in the Northeastern US, there’s a high chance you’ve come across Little Leaf Farms‘ salad greens in the produce section. The 10-year-old company, which has built a “hands-free growing” system inside its greenhouses, now commands more than 50% of marketshare among indoor lettuce growers. Little Leaf greens grace the shelves of around 8,000 grocery stores in New England and the mid-Atlantic states.

The company’s success is a welcome story, given indoor agriculture’s recent past dotted with bankruptcies, closures, and troughs of disillusionment largely related to vertical farming startups.

Greenhouse operations haven’t been totally immune to the market correction, but Little Leaf Farms CEO and founder Paul Sellew has a simple explanation for why they haven’t flailed quite as badly.

“The sun is an amazing resource with all of these benefits. Any logical approach to growing a plant would include the sun.”

Still, Sellew is not one to gloat over corpses of other companies, preferring instead to keep his focus on Little Leaf Farms, growing plants and providing a consistent experience for customers.

Last month, the company announced its third greenhouse, which will operate out of Manchester, Tennessee and serve the Southeastern states, beginning in 2026.

AgFunderNews caught up with Sellew this week to discuss the company’s expansion, the role of tech in indoor agriculture, and why there may actually be a sustainability argument for plastic packaging.

AgFunderNews (AFN): How has Little Leaf Farms weathered the ongoing tough times and kept making reliable products? 

Paul Sellew (PS): There’s this boring thing called day-to-day execution, and it’s quite essential if you’re going to build a successful CEA [controlled environment agriculture] company.

We operate seven days a week, 365 days a year, and we’ve organized the humans around the plants, not the other way around.

AFN: What do you mean by that last point?

PS: Plants grow every day. As a result, running a system—seeding, harvesting, etc.—has to be consistent with the rhythm of how the plants are responding, and we organize humans around that concept.

As a result, the greenhouse is more or less the same, whether it’s the middle of winter or the middle of summer. We just created this controlled environment where the plants are happily growing.

We’re also at a scale where a cold chain is followed, and we’ve got great people that know what they’re doing, which then leads to a consistent eating experience for the customer.

[This approach of “boring day-to-day execution] is not unique to Little Leaf Farms, although it’s amazing that it seems like a hard lesson to get for a lot of companies.

AFN: Do you think there’s an advantage of greenhouse growing over vertical farming?

PS: We’ve always believed that high-tech greenhouses were the solution and vertical farming was in search of a problem that didn’t exist.

The greenhouse industry was here beforehand. It’s here now, and it’ll be here in the future. There’s a very simple reason for this: the sun is a amazing resource with all of these benefits. Any logical approach to growing a plant would include this free resource.

The notion that vertical farming is higher technology [than greenhouses] is simply not true. The greenhouse industry is very sophisticated from a technology standpoint. Our facilities are fully automated, but when it comes down to growing plants, it never made sense to me that you would design a system around not using this free, amazing resource called the sun.

What’s been born out of this, unfortunately, is that many of these companies—not exclusively but predominately vertical farms—have gone bankrupt and failed.

There are other companies though. AppHarvest did not succeed as a company, but all those greenhouses [previously built by AppHarvest in Kentucky] are in operation today. You don’t see vertical farms that were shut down back in operation.

I think a lot of what we’ve seen here is this sort of arrogance around technology—what I’ll call the Silicon Valley mindset that says “agriculture is broken and we’re going to come in with our disrupter mindset.”

That didn’t work. A lot of these companies literally labeled themselves as tech companies when their business model was to sell leafy greens. To me, that was business model confusion.

 Read the full interview about Little Leaf Farms from AgFunder News ….