How a family’s food-poisoning scare spawned a Gulf vertical-farming model

Fifteen years after a nasty bout of food poisoning at a fine-dining restaurant pushed one family to rethink where its produce came from, a small experimental project in Lebanon has grown into one of the Gulf’s more distinctive vertical-farming ventures. A feature in HortiDaily notes that Roy Debbas and partners began indoor trials in 2011 and eventually moved the operation to Dubai under the name EGF Shade of Greens, supplying pesticide-free veg to restaurants, hotels and even straight to households. Speaking with HortiDaily, Roy’s daughter Nicole recalled the moment that mattered most: “If we want truly clean, pesticide-free food, we’ll have to grow it ourselves.”

Shade of Greens has built upward rather than outward. The Dubai site climbs more than four metres, with up to twelve shelves and eleven independently managed rows; each row can be tuned separately for lighting, irrigation, pH and even microclimate. The team says that shelf-by-shelf control wasn’t available off the shelf when they started, so they teamed up with Agrowtek, a Wisconsin-based maker of environmental controllers and dosing systems. Agrowtek’s founder, Mike Sacomano, told HortiDaily that clients pushing the envelope on indoor cultivation are driving product innovation. The company’s own materials describe systems built for multi-zone climate control, automated nutrient dosing, remote access and modular sensor networks — features that match Shade of Greens’ need to monitor everything from nutrient tanks and EC to humidity and temperature from a single interface.

Shade of Greens claims its patented shelf-level climate innovations yield unusually high productivity: the firm told HortiDaily it can reach up to 5,200 lettuce heads per square metre per year under a four-metre-high ceiling. The farm blends automation with human oversight — some delicate tasks like pollination and cutting stay manual so the team can keep quality up. “We’re not 100% automated in Dubai yet, but we believe in staying hands-on,” Nicole noted in the feature, adding that her father remains on the farm every day.

Water management is a recurring theme in closed-loop indoor production, and Shade of Greens says it irrigates via reverse-osmosis systems that reuse water recovered from air-conditioning and humidity. That approach has grown more common across commercial vertical farms: suppliers such as iFarm promote condensate-reuse units that capture dehumidification water and claim these systems can reclaim a substantial slice of daily demand, with retrofits possible for existing facilities. Guidance from HVAC specialist Desert-Aire warns that HVAC condensate is typically low in dissolved solids and often suitable for crop irrigation after filtration, but it also flags health and safety concerns — biofilm and Legionella among them — and recommends bespoke treatment (filtration, UV or other disinfection) and careful integration with irrigation controls. In short, condensate reuse can cut freshwater needs, but it needs engineered treatment and monitoring to manage risk.

The Shade of Greens story likewise illustrates the trade-offs tied to vertical farming’s density push. Academic case studies of vertical lettuce systems show that stacking boosts planting density and can lift overall output, but light gradients and shelf position alter growth and biomass unless spacing and lighting are tuned. The company’s shelf-level climate control is aimed squarely at those challenges: by regulating light intensity, spectrum, airflow and nutrition per shelf, operators seek to soften upper- to lower-tier penalties and produce more uniform harvests.

Regionally, the UAE and Kuwait are turning into active indoor-cultivation markets. HortiDaily notes that Shade of Greens plans to install a larger, more fully automated farm in Kuwait starting in October, echoing the Dubai model at scale while keeping some manual steps for seeding and harvesting. That local expansion sits alongside other independent projects: an Executive Bulletin report highlighted a large indoor facility launched in Kuwait by &ever Middle East (a joint venture between German &ever and NOX Management), a facility said to offer roughly 3,000 m² of growing space and the ability to cultivate about 250 varieties, with a daily output capacity in the hundreds of kilograms. The presence of multiple operators — differing in size, tech stacks and market focus — underscores that the Gulf’s vertical-farming scene is plural and competitive rather than dominated by a single blueprint.

Shade of Greens has so far chosen to focus on a premium local market rather than export. The founders told HortiDaily that year-round, pesticide-free produce is delivered directly to homes and restaurants with stable pricing, and that the perishability and cost structure of ultra-fresh leafy greens make exporting impractical for now. That mirrors a common commercial calculus in the sector: high energy and capital costs, the logistics of chilled, delicate produce, and the value of traceable, same-day delivery all push many operators toward nearby, higher-margin customers.

There are other practical questions investors and buyers should keep an eye on. Yield claims — such as Shade of Greens’ 5,200 lettuce heads per square metre per year — are meaningful but warrant independent verification under the conditions of a given site, crop mix and harvest cadence. Likewise, the choice to automate or retain manual steps is often a balance between quality control, cost and scalability. Agrowtek’s product literature highlights modular, remote-capable control systems and fertigation notes; how those systems perform after years of continuous operation — and how they are integrated with water treatment and food-safety protocols — will be decisive for resilience in a hot, arid climate.

Shade of Greens’ arc — from a Lebanon lab to a Dubai-controlled vertical farm and a Kuwait expansion plan — shows both the potential and the caveats of the region’s indoor-farming rush. The company’s mix of agronomy, engineering and retail know-how is typical of operators aiming to close the loop between grower and consumer. Yet as more large-scale projects come online in the Gulf, the sector’s sustainability profile will hinge as much on energy sourcing, water treatment and operational transparency as on headline yields. As Shade of Greens and others scale, independent data on energy use per kilogram, water reclaimed and consumable quality will be the metrics that separate robust, long-lasting models from pilots that struggle with cost and complexity. Interesting, isn’t it, how the finer details tend to matter just as much as the headlines?

Source: Noah Wire Services