Härnösand, Sweden-based foodtech company Agtira has big plans to streamline the Scandinavian country’s food supply chain.
Employing a Farming-as-a-Service (FaaS) strategy, Agtira aims to grow vegetables and fish close to Sweden’s major retailers. Through long-term supply agreements with those retailers, the products will be sent directly to nearby grocery stores.
“Agtira represents a technology shift that can be compared to when agriculture went from oxen and horses to using tractors," Agtira CEO Erik Jonuks said. "We are changing an industry, and that will eventually affect the whole of society."
Agtira’s FaaS strategy is proving to be increasingly popular with retailers. Recently, Lidl Sweden announced it had become self-sufficient in its cucumber supply by implementing a Faas strategy with Agtira, with the two parties recently signing a 10-year partnership.
While Agtira’s vegetable growth occurs in greenhouses, its fish growth stems from the deployment of compact recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS).
Via a new three-way partnership, Agtira is working with Dutch land-based fish farming engineering and consultancy company Landing Aquaculture to place a compact RAS at its aquaponics facility in Östersund in central Sweden, which is close in proximity to one of retail giant ICA Maxi’s hypermarkets.
Agtira currently supplies the retail outlet with vegetables from its greenhouse, together with salmon and trout from its RAS farm in nearby Härnösand, which is also equipped with a hatchery. The company said it expects fish from the new RAS system will be available for Maxi customers beginning in 2025.
Once it's able to assure retailers of a consistent supply, Agitra plans to market the freshness of its salmon and trout to shoppers, which will augment current in-store offerings, such as in-house sushi preparation counters.
Carlos Espinal, the innovation director at Landing Aquaculture, told SeafoodSource the planning and design of the compact RAS unit Agtira plans to utilize concluded at the beginning of 2024, and the project is now in its ...
