Östgöta Kök is a Swedish restaurant chain in Mid-Sweden which has been committed to their philosophy for the past 15 years, “Deliver the food with love, with selected ingredients and raw material of quality which preferably come from the local farms”. Taking their commitment to local food to another level, Östgöta Kök pens a contract with Swegreen and becomes Swegreen’s ‘Farming as a Service’ customer.
With the concept imbued with strong sustainable thinking and focus on high-quality locally produced leafy greens, herbs and spices, Swegreen’s innovation was right down their alley!
Soon the guests of Östgöta Kök’s restaurant at Nya Torget in Norrköping will be able to enjoy the food that is grown on-site and the restaurant’s very own vertical farm. Swegreen will install its newly launched farming platform, Saga, in Norrköping during the upcoming spring.
– With our own hydroponic vertical farm, we have the chance to give our guests a more appealing dining experience. I have to confess; we were surprised when we tasted Swegreen’s products and sample crops. Crops that they grow taste way better and have a superior aroma, says Thomas Hallgren, who owns Östgöta Kök Group together with Karin Elebring.
From farm to table
Östgöta Kök’s journey to success started around 2004 when the strong interest in local cuisine picked up, and Thomas and Karin built a partnership around a sustainable food mindset and use of locally produced ingredients.
They founded a company, which over the years has grown into a whole restaurant group with investments in everything from fine dining, archipelago restaurants and deli counters to catering or pasta and burger bars. But still, each restaurant concept is built around a strong focus on serving delicious and regional food.
– Our niche has always been to think green and strive for low environmental impact as much as possible. We have a close collaboration with a large number of local suppliers, but now we will be able to produce climate-smart greens ourselves. We can offer our guests greens that have not travelled further than from our farm inside the restaurant to the kitchen and directly to the table, says Thomas while smiling.
Experience with a pinch of the future
The installation of Östgöta Kök’s Saga model will begin in the spring of 2023 in their restaurant in Norrköpinng, and the plan is for the farming unit to be visually exposed for the guests. They will have the possibility of looking at this futuristic technology through glass and see how the plants grow inside the farm.
– Our first restaurant farming unit took place at the Fotografiska museum in Stockholm, and it supplies the museum’s ‘Green Star’ awarded by Michelin Guide restaurant with greens all year round. Now we are extremely glad that yet another restaurant client with focus on sustainability seeks to benefit from the advantages of growing their own greens on site with our technology! The fact that Östgöta Kök commits to this shows that they are at the forefront of the transition towards a more circular future model that will secure the supply of food based on local production, says Pierre Mohlin, CEO at Swegreen.
More info:
Sepehr Mousavi
Chief Innovation Officer, Swegreen
Phone: +46 (0) 733 1400 43
Email: sepehr.mousavi@swegreen.se
Swegreen is an Agtech company and a vertical farming innovation venture based in Sweden. We are offering the world’s most efficient in-store farming solution and the most hyper-local and climate-smart greens, grown in our sustainable, circular, futuristic and controlled-environment growing systems. Swegreen is a pioneering enterprise in offering urban farming in a service model enabled by our AI-driven farm management and cloud-based monitoring platforms – which we call Farming as a Service, FaaS.
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