Hat City Farms delivers produce that tastes and looks great, is healthier than organic, and is better for the environment than anything else you can buy. We use cutting-edge hydroponic technology to deliver a superior product at a competitive price.
Our indoor hydroponic farm in Danbury grows the popular herbs and leafy greens that make your fresh-cooked dishes look and taste great. Because we’re local, we harvest before dawn and have our produce at your restaurant or local store just a few hours later. The only way you can get anything fresher is to grow it yourself.
Because we use hydroponics, we grow year-round and we harvest every day. You get the same variety of each herb in the winter as you do in the summer. This keeps the taste of your signature dishes exactly the way you like them.
What you get when you buy Hat City Farms produce:
Fresh: Our produce is harvested just hours before it reaches your store or restaurant. Hat City Farms products spend minutes, not days or weeks, in transit. That keeps the natural flavor locked in. And because there’s less handling, our produce looks better when it reaches you, so you’ll be proud to serve it.
Tasty: Conventional and organic growers often compromise on flavor to minimize costly waste on the long journey to you – produce often comes from other regions of the US or even from Central or South America. To survive the journey, farmers grow thick-skinned varieties that sacrifice flavor you want for damage resistance and for ease of picking using automatic equipment. We’ve all complained of immense, bland strawberries and rigid, tasteless tomatoes. Hat City Farms grows heirloom and gourmet varieties that you’d want to grow in your own garden. And we prevent damage by picking and packaging everything by hand, then cutting the amount of handling once your food leaves its home at our facility.
Healthy: We deliver all the benefits of organic produce without the drawbacks. Like organic, we never use chemicals to prevent bugs or w**ds. And we don’t use genetically modified seeds. All of those techniques are designed to increase pest resistance. But in our controlled environment, pests can’t get to the crops, so we don’t have to make them bug-resistant using artificial means. And unlike organic, our produce looks fresh, healthy and inviting, not droopy and shopworn like some organic varieties do.
Environmentally friendly: Because we grow locally, our produce travels a handful of miles. We use a tiny fraction of the fuel to get our products to you compared to other companies that bring grapes from Argentina, basil from Chile, tomatoes from Mexico and lettuce from the Salinas Valley in California. Hydroponic technology recirculates nutrient solution with 100% efficiency; there’s no fertilizer runoff to choke waterways and kill fish as there is with field-grown crops.
Perhaps the most important benefit of our hydroponic technology is the near-elimination of food waste. Depending on the crop, 30% to 50% of sprouted seeds for herbs or vegetables never make it to market. Crop losses can come from drought/flooding, an increasing problem in the climate change era, from bugs, from loss in transit or spoilage if it rests too long on the way to your restaurant or store. Our hydroponic technology plus our continuous inspection of our crops means that over 98% of the seeds we sprout make it to consumers; the tiny amount that fails visual inspection gets composted. Better for the environment, and cheaper for customers, who aren’t paying for growing twice the product they actually receive.
Impeccably safe: In the wake of frequent national recalls of contaminated produce, consumers are worried about the safety of the food they buy. Hat City’s technology sidesteps all major risks for food contamination. We grow in a controlled clean room-like environment with filtered water and air, reducing the risk of pest or w**d contamination to nearly zero. We thus never have to use chemicals. Our farmers wear protective coverings whenever in growing areas, eliminating risk of human contamination. Complying with leading-edge industry best practices for food safety is effortless.
Energy efficient: While we use electricity to grow our product indoors, the amount of fossil fuel to generate that electricity is less than the fuel cost of trucking crops thousands of miles to market plus the energy used in refining the tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer wasted in conventional farming. The next generation of our facility will exclusively use renewable sources to generate the electricity we need.
