While farm-to-table restaurants are nothing new, not many operators source their salad greens from right next door. Neon Greens is a newly opened quick-service salad restaurant in St. Louis, Mo., that operates its own 400-square-foot container farm attached to the restaurant storefront.
The farm yields roughly three acres each of 80 different lettuces, all of which Neon Greens uses in its salads, from mizuna lettuce to sweet crisp lettuce. They had to use a 150-foot crane to place the farms into the space, "almost like a claw game at an arcade," he said. The farm also requires a lot of machinery maintenance, as well as plumbing, electrical, and mechanical. But Smith said that the extra complications are worth it in the end.
Neon Greens knows its limits, however. For example, the restaurant does not grow kale on-premises because of the long maturity time, so that is sourced from the outside. Additionally, the company does not grow any produce outside of the salad greens. Lettuce, Smith said, is the "highest yielding and quickest growing product we could grow."
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