Food Waste Technology for Indoor Farming

Tinia Pina, founder and CEO of Re-Nuble—a company that uses food waste to create organic liquid nutrients and growing mediums for indoor farming. Not an easy task! And with indoor farming market growing year over year, Re-Nuble's technology fills many gaps in helping indoor farmer achieve carbon negative status. Listen in and get ready for a win, win, win episode!  https://www.re-nuble.com
  

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Transcript

Triple Bottom Line | Episode 27 | Tinia Pina |

[Upbeat theme music plays] 
Female Voice Over 
[00:03] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here is your host, Taylor Martin!

Taylor Martin 
[00:17] Welcome, everyone. I have Tinia Pina on the call today. She is the founder and CEO of Re-Nuble, and you can put a .com right after that if you want and go right to their website. They take food waste and turn it into growing mediums. They also create liquid nutrients for indoor farming. Now, I know I oversimplified what your company does. Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about yourself, your history, your background, how you got in this, and then let’s start moving into the process your company takes to make these products.

Tinia Pina
[00:52] Absolutely, thanks, first off, Taylor. Thanks for having us on. It’s really exciting to speak to just business leaders, which isn’t the normal for the audience which is more horticultural specific field. The reason why I got into this, my background, just to set the level or the stage, is that I’m not a horticulturalist. I’m not a biologist. I actually majored in information technology at Virginia Tech. I say that because it shouldn’t – anyone getting in a new industry that doesn’t immediately have those skillsets that were really traditionally taught shouldn’t be discouraged to think of outside the box and something new, certainly if they have a solution. The reason why we got into this is back in 2012, I was a pro bono SAT teacher, or prep SAT, did it on the side, worked in finance as the 9 to 5. I was just really seeing our classes, the students, what they were bringing as food options on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. really felt that immediately after lunch you could see a sharp decline in attention. I also felt that that would impact long term the productivity. As a vegetarian, you really see this personal observation of if they solved the immediate benefits of eating more nutritional, more fresh food options, which aren’t the most affordable, especially in the organic category, and this was a school in Harlem, so a lot of food desert areas, more highly processed foods, more accessible.

That was immediate thing that I really resonated with on a personal level. To complement that, New York City was spending, at the time, $77 million to export food waste to China, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. It’s largely because we don’t have the infrastructure to manage compost. Today we spend a little less than $180 million post-COVID. I felt our soil, our traditional farms, do amazing things with food waste. They know how to turn it to compost. They know how to turn it to great, rich, microbial soil amendments that can be brought back into what is regenerative agriculture and sustainable agriculture, largely gaining momentum now. I felt that, and still feel, obviously, that indoor growers would love to be able to benefit from the same type of input or fertilizer or nutrient, but it’s quite challenging for them to incorporate anything that comes from a biological source. To keep it really simple, Taylor, we’re looking at chicken litter, we’re looking at manure, that would do well in soil, but when you add it to a hydroponic or soilless system that’s intended to be incredibly sterile or clean, it can be incredibly disruptive and introduce food born pathogens, pests, and a number of challenges. That’s what I got really passionate about.

Taylor Martin
[03:55] What are hydroponic aquaponic people doing now in terms of their medium? Are they just having to take the compost to a certain level before they can use it? What are they doing and condensing it down to a tea? How does that work?

Tinia Pina
[04:08] Yeah, I can definitely touch on that while also closing the loop on the former point is that the reason why I got into this is if we could enable more indoor growers, and now we’re seeing the macro changes that’s happening worldwide that’s fueling and surging the indoor farming industry, whether it’s weather, erratic weather patterns, the need for more local production to reduce the food milage, the more fresh as direct result of local production, if we could enable more farms to use food waste as a compatible fertilizer compared to synthetic mineral salts, which as the industry has seen has tripled in cost unfortunately because of the Ukrainian invasion, unfortunately because of more food production has also placed a higher demand on this product, this commodity, we’re needing to think outside the box. This would allow for more organic food production, or less chemically laid food production to help more underserved communities have greater access, ideally at an affordable price point.

To bring it to your point of how are aquaponics and hydroponic farmers currently operating, they’re using things like rockwool. They’re using things like coco coir or peat. What’s interesting on the business side is you have countries such as the UK, Canada, Ireland, which they’re the largest producers, global producers of peat, a great alternative to soil, but they recognize the devastating emissions from a greenhouse gas perspective, harvesting or producing peat creates for the world. They put a mandate on reducing and or eliminating production of that type of crop type. It’s crazy. What does that do to our producers? Not only are they competing with increased labor costs, increased energy cost. Energy are roughly 60% to 75% of indoor farms, especially vertical farms, in terms of an operational expense, and then now you’re thinking inputs, fertilizers and the grow medium. To answer your point, Taylor, they’re struggling to find alternative options, which is why it’s really important for our leaders to really think outside the box and find solutions that are ideally circular or regenerative from a point of raw material perspective.

Taylor Martin
[06:32] That’s the problem that they’re having to deal with right now. In comes your product, because you have two liquid products and then the soil medium itself, right?

Tinia Pina
[06:42] That is correct. The soil medium looks something like this. I know it’s not a video but I just want to show you. It’s a crustacean waste derived product, essentially seashells. That’s the base raw material. That’s blended with a number of other organic materials that turns it into a foam. This foam can be standardized and turn into a plug to compete with peat and hopefully reduce the usage of it. With the nutrients, we take – think of compost tea, but the way we manage and we process the food waste is very different than compost tea. If you and I were to take our kitchen waste and basically put it in a five-gallon bucket, put a bubbler in there, and put some molasses, let’s say, to get the really rich bacteria to break down your banana peels, your lettuce remains, whatever it is that you consume that evening, do it over 24 hours. You do have a rich source of compost tea, but that compost tea really only lasts three to four days before the bacteria becomes what would be a risk from a food safety perspective. It doesn’t have shelf-life stability. We basically perfected the science. It’s taken us eight years at least to figure out how to take food waste, make it standardized so that the nutrients that we source, and we would say [inaudible] or just make sure that the plant can take it as a plant food immediately, we use a special approach called organic cycling science to break down the nutrients and ensure that what we’re guaranteeing in this liquid gallon jug is actually available to the farm because with organics in a soilless or hydroponic system, unfortunately, current alternatives there’s a lot of variability and water quality issues.

Taylor Martin
[08:36] Yours can stay on the shelf for a longer period of time, you’re saying.

Tinia Pina
[08:40] That’s correct. It does have a one-year life stability.

Taylor Martin
[08:43] Oh, wow. Now, I’m not a horticulturalist but don’t they have to feed the plants different types of fertilizers at different stages of the growth?

Tinia Pina
[08:51] Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Let’s say lettuce or your typical basil, you can get away with what is called a one-part solution, or we see it as a single bottle solution that allows you to have all the nutrients to support that head of lettuce for the entire 45-day period it’s growing, but unlike let’s say tomatoes or peppers or cannabis or hemp where they have typically a two-month, a little over a two-month grow period, you do need to have traditionally two parts or two different nutrient formulations to serve their specific needs.

Taylor Martin
[09:28] In your proprietary process, and I know you can’t tell us everything, but how does the end product come out to be as nutritious as possible as a medium so that plants can then use that for their growth as opposed to the moss that you were talking about?

Tinia Pina
[09:43] Yeah, on the medium side, that’s a bit more standardized than our nutrients. On the medium, it’s actually a lot easier to produce, to be quite honest with you. You know that the raw materials are crustacean waste. That crustacean waste can vary, can be specific to formula that we’ve drilled in and there’s no variability. On the liquid side, it took us the eight years because it did take time to work with different food waste types and ensure that the, let’s say, there’s a label on fertilizers or nutrients called NAPK label or ratio. That stands for nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium. We have to guarantee that with every unit volume of product that we sell, it’s exactly what’s on the label. We do use an amendment, such as Chilean Nitrate, in addition to our food waste derived nutrients to make sure that we’re hitting the minimum nitrogen that is on the label each product. That gives us that guarantee.

The hardest thing that we’re still working on and reinvesting on RND is how to really source all the nutrients exclusively from food waste. The reason why that’s so hard is not because of their ability of food waste, not because there’s more post-consumer waste from food service and our kitchens, etc., versus pre-consumer, but more so the fact that, without going into too much science stuff, the nutrients in organic form take a lot more time to break down for the plant to readily absorb it as plant food, whereas with your synthetic conventional mineral salts, it’s formulated to be ionic, and because it’s that way, the plant can immediately take it or digest it as plant food. The grower, in this sense, or our customer knows exactly what they’re getting. It’s so precise with mineral salts. With organics, there does take a little bit of a learning curve but we’ve shown that we can provide comparable yield and plant health and vitality to mineral salts.

Taylor Martin
[11:52] Two items there, I think I just learned something. The medium is really, I wouldn’t say benign, but it’s not as important, of course, as the liquid nutrients. It’s just a holding vessel, if you will, correct?

Tinia Pina
[12:02] You’re exactly right. That’s a great way to say it. It’s inert. Some farms prefer that to be benign or inert because they want to have the ability to customize what’s going into the medium and what’s ultimately feeding the plant.

Taylor Martin
[12:16] Full control.

Tinia Pina
[12:17] That’s right.

Taylor Martin
[12:18] Very human-like to have control.

Tinia Pina
[12:21] Yeah. [Laughs]

Taylor Martin
[12:23] The other question I had was how versatile this whole process is with aquaponics indoor farming. What’s the range of food production that this can be used for?

Tinia Pina
[12:35] Good question. There’s a lot of innovation happening on the system types on the technologies to add data and augmented reality and just machine learning so that they can expand the types of food or crops grown in these systems. Right now, the majority of the market is leafy greens, so your herbs and your lettuce varieties, followed by tomatoes, let’s say that’s inclusive of cannabis and hemp, followed by berries. Berries is a very exciting category for a lot of producers because they see the premium. It is also fairly challenging because it requires more labor. It requires specific type of setup of these farms to allow for ease of harvesting. Then there’s these new categories that are exploratory, like potatoes, watermelon, carrots, starting to get into your rooting crops. I should mention, the industry has never been interested in fully replacing or even trying to carve out or push out traditional farms. They just recognize, and it’s finally getting to the point that the rest of the public recognizes that, if we are going to meet the current production levels and future needed production levels based on the global population rate, we’re going to have to supplement how we grow. Indoor growing is a way to do that.

Taylor Martin
[14:02] Yeah, I concur with that 100%. Does this process lend itself to be more organic available to have organic certification? Because it seems like you have so much control over it that you don’t have to worry about using pesticides and insecticides and things of that nature that rule you out of being organic.

Tinia Pina
[14:20] Good point. It does lend as in we are seeking organic certification for our media as well as our nutrients. You know what’s interesting, Taylor, is that there are farms that could care less about it. Even though the premium could be anywhere from 20% to 60% depending on the region, depending on their wholesale buyers, whether it’s Kroger’s or Whole Foods, I’m not being specific to any one of those brands, but we’ve been told that their buyer could care less about the [inaudible] USDA organic certification. Their consumers, their customers, ultimately, it seems like local and sustainable is driving, having more of a precedent than the organic certification. It’s interesting in that they are planning for the organic category, and this is within food CPG at large, to be 60 billion. I don’t remember what year that’s supposed to be by. For the indoor farms, the reason why there’s so few organic certified is, one, the way to grow organic with a nutrient that’s cost effective for them and really keeps to a water quality that’s not going to be disruptive to their operations procedures doesn’t exist, and that’s why we’re here, and two, of those currently growing, there hasn’t been significant pressure for them to grow organic certified unless they’re strictly trying to pursue additional premium.

Taylor Martin
[15:49] Earlier you talked about sourcing food waste. How do you source the food waste? Is it coming more industrial or pre-consumer or is it post?

Tinia Pina
[15:59] It is pre-consumer. We do need to have that standardization on the food waste type and making sure we’re processing it the same way. Earlier when we first started, we were taking post-consumer or waste directly from restaurants and hospitality, but the bacteria and how to manage it became so laborious that it’s like we just need to keep it vegetative waste only. What’s interesting is there’s even these micro niches called vegan where some say – I remember we were approached by an investor that had a mandate for vegan-only products. For the farms, that’s not really important from an input perspective, but it exists.

Taylor Martin
[16:42] With this process, I can only imagine how much better our environment is because of all these different measurements you’re taking, not with just your product but also your product being used and then the void that it creates, meaning from all the chemicals and pesticides that are not needed to do traditional farming. I mean, there’s some measurement there that should be counted for because you’re providing a solution indoor, and then by doing so, if you compared it to traditional farming, there’s those numbers.

Tinia Pina
[17:12] Yeah, and we try to use – that’s where the grow media came from is how do we fully make our internal process in Rochester. Our facility is in upstate New York. We’re headquartered in New York City. We thoroughly thought, not only do we have to report the GHC, or greenhouse gas emission impact, to our customers because their investors and their [inaudible] partners ask for those sustainability metrics, but also internally, we need to keep ourselves also strictly accountable. With the exception of about 3% to 5% of just materials that we aren’t able to recycle or use in our own process, everything is fully recyclable. From the water derived from pressing the food waste, that is [inaudible] filtered and we use that in part of our process, to the residual solids that’s made. We use a separate process to cultivate additional bio-stimulants from that. We had an LCA, or a lifecycle analysis, done about a year ago, no, two years ago before COVID, but as a result of COVID, we had to completely change our process to make it a bit more affordable from a capex perspective and so we do need to have a new LCA performed.

Taylor Martin
[18:27] Sounds like you’re helping farmers achieve carbon negative agriculture.

Tinia Pina
[18:32] To our best ability, we can do it on the input side. Energy is a different beast. I mean, I wish we could make an impact there. We cannot at this time. What we’re really trying to measure is if our products can help your plants grow in higher temperatures, then inherently we can also help them reduce their cooling cost, which is a large budget expense from an energy perspective. It’s a byproduct of what’s in our product allowing for these plants to be a bit more resilient. When you think of drought, that’s a huge benefit. We can’t claim that yet but it is something we are closely monitoring.

Taylor Martin
[19:13] In terms of indoor farming, how do you see that industry growing? No pun intended there.

Tinia Pina
[19:21] Good point. I think we’re comanaging this project called Glens Falls Vertical Farm. It’s located in a smaller city, which is traditionally textile before a lot of that industry had left. They’re looking for economic revitalization. They see this vertical farm pilot as a way to introduce new green jobs, not only in the farm but also indirect jobs as well. I think if we can prove through that pilot that we can reduce the capex, the barriers of entry, which is largely around the infrastructure to set it up, make it really easy to set up utilities like energy and really looking at energy recovery and storage, then if this small municipality outside of New York City, about four hours northeast within the state of New York, is able to do it on a third floor of a traditional commercial space within downtown Glens Falls, 2,000 square feet, and we’re doing it within a grow box of a 2,000-square-foot floor, then the goal would be to make it replicable for other [inaudible] urban or rural areas to have a similar model. Even more for the reason because traditional farms, which in the state of New York I think roughly have six, maybe slightly more than six months to actually be productive, this can be a way to diversify their revenue streams, increase it year-round, and also just be able to – allow them to participate in other types of crop varieties.

Taylor Martin
[20:57] Yeah, I mean, you’re basically doing a case study that shows that we can do it here, you can do it anywhere.

Tinia Pina
[21:02] Exactly, and hopefully make it more affordable for the most people to do it.

Taylor Martin
[21:08] Yeah, I mean, first thing that I thought of when you were talking about that, I was thinking all these malls across America that are failing, that’s a very large indoor spaces, that would be a good solution for them. How do you see the food stream changing over the coming years? If you can look into your future box, what would you see?

Tinia Pina
[21:30] Good question. I mean, I think there is certainly more growth within the ethnic food category. I definitely see it within medicinal. People are more experimental, more exploratory, and trying new things to better their health. I also think that they’re open to whatever is going to help them achieve more nutrient density. I think last month there was a report done by – I can’t remember. It wasn’t the Rodale Institute. I think it was outside the US – or maybe the University of Washington, but basically, the professor had shown that as a result of regenerative agriculture practices, such as no tilling, cover cropping, crop rotation, and introducing a consistent protocol around compost, that it was able to increase the nutritional density of the food. I think that is becoming more palatable to the regular consumer. If people can eat food that will help them keep to their dietary guidelines and if they recognize that they’re actually healing as a result of food, the thing is that there’s so many – and I’m not sure if you’ve even seen this as well, but it’s more anecdotal than it is research-driven in terms of food is medicine. There does need to be more research tying into direct food consumption of specific food and how that has been a needle pusher in terms of getting people to have better health outcomes. I think finally people are investing in it. I would much rather see that than an app or some type of hardware strapped to my wrist to personalize my nutrition.

Taylor Martin
[23:15] Yeah, I agree. Garbage in, garbage out. I always think about the top soil, the quality of our top soil we have now as opposed to what it was 50 years ago, 100 years ago. Night and day, totally different. I think people, like you mentioned, I don’t think people realize the nutritional loss that we’re getting from the lack of nutrients in that top soil. I had a client years ago that was a [inaudible] farmer but of animals. They would rotate the animals on a very certain schedule so that the chickens went out and did their business, but they only did their business after certain goats went out there and ate all the grass to bring it down and they did all their pooping. They’d wait a certain amount of days so the flies would get on the poop and then they would leave the larva. Then the chickens would come in and eat the larva and then push all the poop around.

Anyway, there was just this wonderful process. I talked to the farmer and he goes, “I’m raising animals but I’m really growing grass. That’s what I’m doing. I’m growing better grass,” because every year just that little bit of top soil gets created by this process. There’s pigs involved and everything. Every year it gets more and more better quality nutrients in the soil. Then it gets to a point where it gets so tall after a decade plus that then the top soil is all encompassing of the root structure of the grass. That to me I was like, wow, I literally never thought of it that way. I had no idea. That was my first opening to how we’re treating our food streams and how we’re misbehaving in that regard. In terms of indoor farming, which I’m completely fascinated with because it allows you so much control and you can, like you just demonstrated, you can put them anywhere, how much better is the nutritional quality of indoor farming than traditional farming?

Tinia Pina
[25:08] It is largely to be confirmed. I think there’s some slight studies about conventionally grown produce, let’s say lettuce that are crisp, compared to one that’s grown using a dryponic approach, which is a farm in the middle east that’s used it, that I’m aware of. I’m sure there’s others. They show side by side [inaudible] density, the amount of vitamin A, K, and C I think they were tracking, but I don’t see much nutrition coming from when you use, and again, this is my own opinion, when you use just conventional mineral salt and metal micronutrient regimen. I large attribute and our team largely attributes, and I imagine most agronomists, the micronutrient profile or the spectrum that you’re able to make available to the plant is going to dictate the nutrition. It’s going to dictate the flavor and the color that the plant ends with. If you’re solely focusing on driving as much nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium consistently and not really focusing on the microbial synergy that make for what happens with micronutrients to the plant more efficient, that’s what we’re hoping to track at the Glens Falls Vertical Farm pilot is how we can increase nutritional density because I remain skeptical of it meeting what was the nutritional profile, let’s say 20, 30 years ago done in the soil.

Taylor Martin
[26:40] Yeah, that sounds really interesting. You mentioned something earlier about a case study that you guys were working on. Can you dig into that?

Tinia Pina
[26:47] Yeah, so it’s for the longest – a challenge of ours, Taylor, has always been getting – not farm partners, we have plenty of farm partners. Getting the data in a reliable and consistent way for us to really show the impact of our products to these farms. The problem that causes this is because in this industry where there’s a lot of new entrance, a lot of innovation and everyone beats their chest on what is seen as proprietary or IP really held to the lighting infrastructure, the nutrients that they use, the environmental conditions, all of that, right? That’s their IP. It makes it challenging for us to demonstrate to others our impact because this data share when we’re really only interested in the water quality of how our nutrients impact their systems and things like the temperature and things of that nature. That’s why we started the Glens Falls Vertical Farm so that we can publicly disseminate the outcomes of that and teach others, especially using our product. We do have some other case studies that we’ve had some really just great partners on the farm side working with us to make those case studies available in July, though.

Taylor Martin
[28:05] Awesome, I look forward to reading those. I want to talk about the full circle here. You’ve talked about the beginning of the product, making the product, and using of the product, but what happens afterwards in terms of the growth medium and the liquids, the fertilizers that are produced? How are those broken down and managed in compostable ways?

Tinia Pina
[28:22] Good point. On the nutrient side, we really try to push the needle on not traditionally discharging these reservoirs at these farms. They’re typically dumping them in their waste water line every three weeks, if not every three weeks, then on average, let’s say, two to three months. They do that because they want to make sure that they know exactly which nutrients reside or still remain in their reservoir or water tank. We want to make it so that these farms aren’t discharging every few months, try to keep it to at least six months or a year, because the good thing with our product is it’s not high in sodium. As a result, these farms can use the nutrients that still remain that the plant hasn’t used up for a longer period of time whereas when using mineral salts there’s chemical reactions happening causing the things like sodium and calcium to precipitate out and so therefore it removes the need for the ability to have control. That’s on the nutrient side. On the grow media, the product is fully compostable, so unlike rockwool where it is strictly landfill bound, it cannot be composted, peat can be composted. I believe it takes roughly three to four months to biodegrade or fully compost. Then there’s other alternatives. Ours can be fully composted within 60 days. That’s purely because the raw materials designed within the formula. It made it really interesting and also challenging to how create structure for the plant in a product that can compost, but we’ve been able to figure that out without compromising on the ability to compost fully.

Taylor Martin
[30:06] Yeah, I mean, I think about that just with my garbage bags because they compost while they’re in the trash. It’s like the bottom falls out. It takes only 60 days. Then once it’s done, is it completely ready to go, the compost?

Tinia Pina
[30:23] Yeah, you could put it in your backyard compost or the farm could put it in an industrial compost. They could have the peace of mind that it is fully going to compost, especially for those farms that do track from the entire lifecycle their outputs.

Taylor Martin
[30:37] Yeah, because I mean, I know some farmers will be very cautious of not using compost too early because it could degrade the quality of their output, right?

Tinia Pina
[30:47] Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been able to overcome that by giving more [inaudible] and structure and revising the formula so that it doesn’t – we’re not – it doesn’t disappear before Day 60.

Taylor Martin
[31:00] Right, so what would be a wonderful future for Re-Nuble? Would you guys want to have – because I can imagine having multiple sites just across the United States alone, because that way, you’re close to the sources and you can create and make and ship right then and there. Is that what your vision is for a homerun for the company?

Tinia Pina
[31:21] Yeah, you’re exactly right in the sense of we’ve always, even before COVID disrupting supply chains, we’ve always thought of this as a model that can introduce distributed nutrient or fertilizer manufacturing. Giving more, returning more value to especially agriculture economies outside of the US where India largely imports 90% of their inputs, fertilizers. This gives them a way to be able to take their localized waste streams and turn it into inputs that they no longer have to depend on others. It reduces the cost to distribute and reducing the cost to ultimately the downstream customer. We see that as an opportunity. We also see the opportunity to license it to strategic partners where they have [inaudible] customers and distributed distribution channels and we just want to replicate the process in a way that will still have high efficacy for their own waste streams.

Taylor Martin
[32:20] How are you guys doing financially? Are you guys looking for any venture capital? Where is that at?

Tinia Pina
[32:25] Good question. We’ve raised $3 million to date. We’re a post see still early stage but post see. Our goal is to be profitable by the end of this year. We always still have conversations with investors. A lot of our investors are impact, so speaking the same language as you and I and your audience. It’s interesting to watch how they’re increasingly becoming more sophisticated of what are the types of metrics that we also have to report as well.

Taylor Martin
[32:52] Yeah, that’s great. Do you see the world is more accepting of your technology as days go on? It seems like it’s a viable product and you’re answering some serious problems that no one else is tackling. How do you see it from your lens?

Tinia Pina
[33:09] Yeah, when we first started fundraising, people saw it as too small of a niche. They would be like why aren’t you going after large soil. We’re really uncertain of how many indoor growers there are, especially when you look at organic. We’ve always had the position of, yes, our beachhead market is indoor growers. It’s certainly not limited to just organic. The products can also be used for outdoor – I mean, not outdoor, for conventional. What’s interesting is that because of the fertilizer shortage specifically more farms, especially soil, are becoming more openminded to organics, more manure in the case of soil farms are being used instead of, let’s say, urea because the price has tripled and the ability to get access to it. As a distributer or farm, if you didn’t get your fertilizer requirements for the year by last August, you’re pretty much out of luck. That has forced a tremendous amount of pressure for farms in changing their roadmap of how they grow. Some farms are – look, I think there’s going to be a lot more consolidation. I think there’s going to be some more farms going under because they just can’t keep up with how much their margins are shrinking as a result of increased input cost, labor, energy, and the like. We’re not the only ones to experience this here in the US. You see it in the UK and Europe. That has led to more attention and more open-mindedness for our approach.

Taylor Martin
[34:49] That’s fantastic. I wish you guys all the best because when I hear things like this, I see a lot of future with indoor farming just because it makes so much sense and it allows there to eliminate food deserts and to bring food to people, no matter where you’re at. The fact that you’re doing this in a commercial space on a floor just like, duh, it’s a no brainer, right? Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about how they can reach out to you or if they want to follow you on social media or your website or LinkedIn?

Tinia Pina
[35:19] Yeah, absolutely. I’m on LinkedIn, pretty open, name is Tinia Pina, so T-I-N-I-A and then Pina like the drink pina colada, can’t miss it. The company, all of our social media channels are on our website at, just like you spelled earlier, Taylor, re-nuble.com. We also have a newsletter that’s probably the best way to follow us. I also contribute to the newsletter on observations that I’m seeing. On our website, we do talk about the Glens Falls Vertical Farm. For those excited about the indoor ad space or that niche, we’re pretty much being open data sharing. Our goal is to really reveal and make it accessible to those considering the same.

Taylor Martin
[36:07] Excellent. Wonderful work, great product. Thank you so much for being on the show, Ms. Pina. I really, really appreciate your time. Good work.

Tinia Pina
[36:16] Thank you, Taylor. I really appreciated this time as well.

Taylor Martin
[36:19] Over and out, everybody.

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[36:20] Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you are logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.

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