The Plant is a research and production facility located in Chicago’s former Union Stock Yards. With 100,000+ square feet, the repurposed meatpacking plant is now home to more than 20 small plant-based food businesses that create a thriving, collaborative community. John Edel, the founder of The Plant, says its mission is to close waste and energy loops, striving for circular production processes. The heat from Whiner Beer Co. is redirected and used in other portions of the building, and a few farms, such as Closed Loop Farms, stretch the square footage with vertical farms to grow microgreens used by restaurants in the Chicago-land area. Other tenants include Back of the Yards Algae Sciences and Sacred Serve.
Joey Thurman: I'm here with John Edel, founder and director of The Plant. I smell greens. I feel fresh. This is pretty great, man. Thanks for having me.
John Edel: Absolutely, you're welcome.
Joey Thurman: Chicago is really interesting because I think it's the food Mecca of the world. And I think people often think about that as your traditional source plant protein, but you are doing something completely different here, we're closing the loop, we're opening up opportunities and this is really cool. So tell me a little bit about The Plant.
John Edel: First off, we're in the stock yards. And so when you're talking about Chicago being the food Mecca, starting way back, 1865. And this area has always been where food innovation took place. We lost it for a while there, but now Chicago really has its food immigration mojo back. There's a lot of great companies around here and actually biotechs that are starting to locate literally here in the yards. So it's a dawn of a new era for us here.
Joey Thurman: It was really needed because this building itself was something prior years ago, right?
John Edel: This was a pork packing facility. And so 24/7, they were in here making bacon and hams and we're about a hundred thousand square feet. The building was built in '25. I actually bought it from the original owners.
Joey Thurman: Really?
John Edel: So I'm the second owner of the building.
Joey Thurman: The irony of that.
John Edel: Yeah.
Joey Thurman: You went from pork packing to the predominantly all these companies in here are plant-based
John Edel: That's right. That's right.
Joey Thurman: So when you talk about closing the loop, what does that mean? I think people really have a loose terminology of what that means.
John Edel: Well, first off we look at this as a living laboratory. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to take the output of one process and make it the input of another process.
Joey Thurman: Okay.
John Edel: And so for small businesses, and we have about 22 small businesses here at The Plant, all food, that means taking some portion of their waste stream and using it as an input to another business. And so that can be things like carbon dioxide and actually above us here, the gray line is a CO2 line that's harvesting waste CO2 from Wine or Beer Company down at this end and running about 300 feet up to the back of the yards, LG sciences at the top end of the building.
Joey Thurman: So you can go ask algae, work on decrease inflammation and go have a beer all at the same place?
John Edel: Oh, absolutely.
Joey Thurman: That's brilliant.
John Edel: So there's a lot of other loops that can be closed too, things like oxygen from grow rooms. Heats is a really easy one because all of this food manufacturing is very energy intensive and so we create large amounts of heat. We also have large amounts of refrigeration in the building. And so balancing all of these energy loads is one of the things that makes all of this work, because what we're trying to do is provide economies of scale for small businesses that they wouldn't have if they were operating on their own.
Joey Thurman: So they don't build it like they used to?
John Edel: They sure don't. They sure don't.
Joey Thurman: That's great that we have the opportunity to come in and take a look at The Plant. So you want to show me around?
John Edel: Absolutely. We're above our wetland, so this is home to three turtles and a bunch of fish, and it's designed to clean wastewater as a demonstration. But we have a living wall. We have some native plants. We have our bio-remediation planters where we are doing experiments on contaminated soils using LG and mycelia for remediation. And so all of that is fed with the water that circulates in the system. The demonstration here is that it's actually quite safe to live in if you're a turtle who's been here for a long time.
Joey Thurman: What's the turtle's name?
John Edel: Justine.
Joey Thurman: Justine.
John Edel: Justine. She was found at Justine and 46, which is one block West of us here, in the middle of the street. So let's walk on through. We're in what used to be former loading docks and we have six docs here so we really didn't need all of them. So we decided to turn these three into our lobby and to try to demonstrate some of the features of the building as we go through.
Joey Thurman: You really get to feel like you're walking into nature and it's inside. So what's the purpose?
John Edel: Well, we're trying to demonstrate to any visitors that come here, we get about 10,000 tour visitors a year pre pandemic, and people that come to the taproom into the other businesses here. And we want them to be exposed. And even if they just casually pick up a tiny bit of information, just getting an idea, "Oh, there's a different way to operate. And there's a different kind of a space that can be created." And so hopefully people are learning something, gleaning some kind of information from it. All right. So let's run on through.
John Edel: All right, we're going to pop into Wine or Beer Company's brew house here. Brewing is important to us because it's the low-hanging fruit of waste and energy capture and recovery and reuse. We talked a little bit about carbon dioxide, but the grains, distillers grains have all sorts of uses from composting. You can bake them into breads, which has happened here before. But there's also a lot of heat that comes from the brewery as well. And so we actually heat a lot of the West end of the building with waste heat that they're done with.
Joey Thurman: So you're tapping into their heat and heating up the building?
John Edel: Well, yeah. It's heat that they need to get out anyway. And so there are a lot of simple things like that, that are really more common sense than they are engineering, frankly.
Joey Thurman: So it's like all these businesses within this facility or its own microbiome and just feeding the rest of the system.
John Edel: That's what we try. That's what we strive for. And we don't really succeed all the time. Sometimes we succeed this much or we go backwards, but you have to try it. And so we would describe that as throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. And the beauty of this and the way we operate is, it's not a university and it's not a corporation and so we don't have shareholders telling us what to do. We don't have a university imposing all kinds of rules. So if we want to cut into a wall and cut into the HPAC system, we cut into it. If a tiny for-profit company can do it and be that efficient, then you've proven something. And now you've got that replicable model that people can look at it and say, "Gee, if these guys can do it, and that guy's got an art degree, how come we can't?"
Joey Thurman: So Mr. Art degree, what's your vision for this is, is to use this kind of as a scalable model for other people to use?
John Edel: Absolutely. Absolutely. And so we do a lot of talking about what we do here and a lot of demonstrating and we're building a toolkit online right now in plain English. It's not white papers, it's written so that even a politician can understand it.
Joey Thurman: Anyway, let's go on here. We're going to avoid that one.
John Edel: Yep. From the start, the concept behind The Plant involved the brewery.
Joey Thurman: Really? So you got this and the brewery was ready to go or how did you do this?
John Edel: No, we actually went through a series of other attempts at opening a brewery, which is incredibly difficult. Other concepts from the start were farming. So The Plant was intended to be about 30% indoor farm from the start. That was part of the concept.
Joey Thurman: Okay.
John Edel: So brewery, farm, and then miscellaneous other food businesses to be built in later.
Joey Thurman: So this is really interesting how this building has its own life. And if someone wants to do something like this in their own area, how do you even begin to start?
John Edel: Well, it flows from the building, it flows from what you have available. And just about every city or town everywhere has some kind of industrial stock that's just sitting there. And so again, it's about playing to the strengths. So it's trying to figure out what is that building good at? There are higher uses and lower uses, but certainly a higher use is food production because a food production building is incredibly expensive to build. And so if you can make one function in that, you're money ahead. And then cascading down through other kinds of manufacturing, condominiums, and eventually storage. Everybody always says the greenest building is an existing building. So what if you built a lead platinum facility, what did you tear down to build it? And why couldn't you take advantage of that structure and rebuild the mechanical systems and insulate it and this sort of thing?
John Edel: And so those are simple lessons that we can, for very low price per square foot, be able to take advantage of what we have, add the icing on top of that and the efficient systems and computer controls and all of this, and get to a lower square foot price for the tenants that makes their businesses better able to operate.
Joey Thurman: This building itself, we're in the brewery, we're in the barrel room and it's multilevel that's getting this life to this brewery.
John Edel: Yeah. Yeah. And it's connected, it's all connected.
Joey Thurman: Yeah.
John Edel: And that's kind of the beauty of it is that pipes from here are going to other places and we have three different internal drain systems. And it's sort of like the body worlds exhibit where you see these networks of things connected.
Joey Thurman: Yeah. This is amazing because you go in a grocery store and you just see a little plastic container and you see these little sprouts and whatever, 15, 20 bucks. Now it makes so much sense because all of the work that is going into just producing a little amount of micro-grains.
John Edel: Yeah, high quality is not done on, you don't do it out in a giant farm field somewhere with a lot of chemicals.
Joey Thurman: Yeah.
John Edel: It's done with tight control of the environment that it's in. And when you do that, indoor growing, this is officially a vertical farm and the whole building is, you are controlling pests naturally because you're inside. The biggest farms at The Plant are all in the basement because it's a lot easier to maintain temperature down here. And so we're not having to artificially air condition as much because we're using the ground temperature to help keep these farms cool.
Joey Thurman: It is noticeably cooler down here. And it is really interesting when just walking into this and just seeing the love and care. And you're right, there's insects and all sorts of different things that you normally have to spray for. And you're just in this controlled environment. And I'd love to see all these vertical farms popping up all over the country.
John Edel: Oh yeah. And the concept of vertical farms goes back quite a ways, but beautiful glass skyscrapers in Manhattan totally ridiculous. But if you're talking about $700 a square foot to build a farm, it will never pay for itself. And so vertical farming makes a lot of sense than existing buildings. And this is a perfect example like, "Oh, well putting a farm in a food production building is about the easiest possible retrofit you could do. We already have floor drains everywhere. Everything's already food grade." And so that brings the cost of those greens down. And the more you do it and the larger the farms get within the structure, the more efficient they are and the cheaper that clam shell is.
Joey Thurman: Yeah.
John Edel: There are five farms indoors at The Plant.
Joey Thurman: Okay.
John Edel: And they're all different, all very different from each other. They grow different crops. They have different target markets and they do everything in different kinds of ways.
Joey Thurman: So we're in farm number two here. You said they're all different. What does this one do?
John Edel: So this farm is all micro greens. And these are micro's that are primarily going to restaurants.
Joey Thurman: Okay.
John Edel: This is closed loop farms. And they're doing, in addition to the home delivery, restaurants are picking back up. So this space was at one point before the pandemic filled with grow racks. And so when they shifted, the business model changed and things shifted around in the space.
Joey Thurman: Sure.
John Edel: But again, we're in the basement, easy to cool, easy to hose things down without worrying about water going anywhere. It goes down the floor drains. So the kind of greens that they grow, I think they're around 35, 35 different types of micro's that they have. And this is all soil based as opposed to nutrient film technique.
Joey Thurman: Which the other one?
John Edel: Yeah, Urban Eaton si doing next door. And so this is, it's a different market and it's a different type of green. But there are many different ways to grow inside of a building.
Joey Thurman: From walking around, I noticed a lot of just discoloration in the building and what really caused that? It seems like it's intentional without being intentional.
John Edel: Intentional over many years, but we're in three former smokehouses. And we're in what we call our winter garden. And this was a space that was the darkest, most foreboding scariest place you could ever imagine in these three rooms. We took the walls out between a lot of them, kept a lot of the original terracotta here and actually sealed in the smoke damage from when they were smoking bacon and hams in here, because I wanted to, again, keep alive what the building felt like and what its original purpose was. And then we highlight that and contrast that with plants and now these vines and other plants are taking over this meat production space as if nature is reclaiming it.
Joey Thurman: There's almost a bacon smell to this level. I don't know if it just ingrained into the walls, which is really cool to see that. And obviously inventory of these businesses are completely plant-based. So it's really nice to see how this building is taking life.
John Edel: Every once in a while people ask me when we're going to dry wall in here. So no, we're not going to dry wall.
Joey Thurman: What do we have here? What are we standing under?
John Edel: This is our anaerobic digester. This is a plug flow system. It's about 60% complete right now. We're hoping in the next year or two to restart the construction on it. It is designed ultimately to consume 32 tons per day, 365 days a year, 32 tons of food waste and turn it into bio gas, solid digest state and liquid digest state. The economics of it are that tipping fees from incoming waste, instead of going to a landfill or a large-scale composting facility outside of the city, the food waste is generated here in the city, so driving it a shorter distance, tipping it here, paying us the same price that the big guys are charging for their giant facility way out of town, comes in, gets turned into the byproducts, being the solid digest state, the liquid and the bio gas.
John Edel: The bio gas is fairly easy to work with. We're going to burn it in the brewery boilers in building boilers to heat algae and bioreactors. So that's easy to work with. The solid digest state, it's like compost or hummus and it can be blended into structured soils or other green rift growing media, that kind of thing. It's actually a sort of valuable material. The liquid is where it gets interesting and difficult because it's to acquiesce to be worth trucking very far so you can put it in a tanker and drive it out to field, apply it on a farm somewhere. It'll vastly overwhelm our farms here because we're talking about 3 million gallons a year of liquid. This is a fair amount. So by the time you drive it a hundred miles, the value has gone negative because you've spent more diesel, created more pollution, and cost more labor time than the stuff is worth.
John Edel: And so the key is to cycle that back into some process here. And so we call that valorization of the waste.
Joey Thurman: Valorization.
John Edel: Valorization, yes. And so the idea is to extract value from something that is otherwise junk. We need to make something out of it to grow something on it. It's rich in nutrients. You just got to get those nutrients out, probably through an algal intermediary. And then you've got something.
Joey Thurman: Right now we're in the back of the yards and back of the yards of The Plant. John, what do we have here?
John Edel: We're in the closed and farms greenhouse here. And so they're doing a lot of edible flowers in here, as well as other more traditional crops, basil and whatnot. We're sitting on three acres here in the middle of the city. What's interesting about any urban area is that we're surrounded by waste. And so The Plant is really about re-imagining that waste and figuring out how can that feed into new economies, new types of food? How can we work with that instead of trucking it out somewhere and burying it in the ground? We need to figure out how to work within that. So that's what we're doing here.
Joey Thurman: What's your feeling when you're going around and showing this to people and how it just came from a little seedling, if you will, to this?
John Edel: Well, The Plant is really a community is what it is. It's not me, it's of these people with all these ideas. And I'm not an engineer, I'm not a farmer, I'm not a food producer. I just like to bring people together that know how to do these things and say, "Okay, this is your expertise and this is where you fit into this picture." And all the tenants here are self-selecting. We don't advertise for space. We have a waiting list to get in.
Joey Thurman: Really?
John Edel: We don't need to advertise for space because the people that are here, are here because they want to be here because they see their role in the circular economy, and in creating new types of food production. And they want to be here because this is the place that's happening.
Joey Thurman: It definitely is happening right here. Well, obviously, thank you so much. And where can people find out more about you?
John Edel: Insidetheplant.com. And you can also follow our various socials that way, but start at insidetheplant.com and learn all about us.