SPREAD Co., Ltd.

SPREAD Co., Ltd. is a Japanese vertical farming company headquartered at Kyoto Research Park in Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto. The company was established on January 5, 2006 by Shinji Inada, a former vegetable trader who remains its Chief Executive Officer. Spread grows leafy greens, mainly lettuce, in fully indoor plant factories under LED lighting and sells them under its own consumer brand, Vegetus. Its business is vertical farm operations and vegetable production, with research and development, production and sales all managed in-house.

Spread's first facility, the Kameoka Plant in Kyoto Prefecture, began operating in 2007. It produces about 21,000 heads of lettuce per day, and Spread states that the plant reached profitability in 2013, which it describes as a world first for a large-scale artificial-light plant factory. Kameoka reached a 97% operating rate after six years.

The company's second-generation design is branded Techno Farm. Techno Farm Keihanna, in Kizugawa, Kyoto, began shipping in November 2018. It was designed around automated cultivation, with automated handling of the growing trays for seeding, tending and harvesting, custom LED lighting, and water recycling that uses about 110 milliliters of water per lettuce head (2018 figure). According to the Kansai Bureau of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI Kansai), Keihanna automates about 70% of all processes, runs a 33-day growing cycle with a 97% production yield, and has a capacity of about 3 tons per day. The plant reached a 99.2% operating rate within two years of start-up. Spread also operates Techno Farm Narita, which opened in 2021, and a showroom and office, Techno Garden Tokyo, opened in October 2017.

The third and largest site is Techno Farm Fukuroi in Fukuroi, Shizuoka Prefecture. It was developed through TSUNAGU Community Farm LLC, a joint company formed by Spread, Chubu Electric Power Co., Inc. and ES-CON JAPAN Ltd. Construction was planned to start in October 2021, and the plant began operating in 2024. It is designed for 10 tons of lettuce per day, which Spread describes as the world's largest automated vertical farm by volume. Spread reported that about 80% of operations at Fukuroi are automated. Part of the output is supplied to Techno Fresh Hadano, a 4,800 m2 salad-processing plant handling about 8 tons of fresh-cut lettuce per day, where about 85% of operations are automated, including an AI-enabled robot that removes lettuce cores. The Techno Fresh processing approach won a 2023 Vertical Farming World Award.

Operations are managed with Techno Farm Cloud, an IoT-based cultivation management platform developed by Spread, and the company has worked with NTT West on AI analysis of production data. Spread has licensed its Techno Farm system to other operators: in 2018 JX ANCI and Mitsubishi Gas Chemical announced indoor farms using Spread's licensed system, and the company signed agreements with food producers in the United Arab Emirates. Inada received a 2016 Edison Award for the vertical farming system.

In August 2022 Spread closed a Series A round of about 4 billion yen (around US$30 million), described at the time as the largest single fundraising in Japan's food tech sector. Investors included corporate and angel investors; J-Startup KANSAI and Fortuna Ventures are among its backers. The funds were earmarked for Fukuroi technology development, Vegetus brand marketing, and research on indoor strawberries and alternative proteins. Spread reported selling about 90 million packs of Vegetus produce through roughly 4,500 stores in Japan, and it has set a target of producing 100 tons of lettuce per day in Japan by 2030. In 2023 it became the first Japanese company to sign the Vertical Farming Manifesto.