LETTUCE REJOICE

It’s a bleak and dreary afternoon in the Old Fourth Ward area of Atlanta, and you’re looking for a lettuce farm. You can smell the stench of garbage and used fryer grease emanating from the chicken joint at the corner of Ponce de Leon Avenue and Boulevard as a couple of overbundled and tired homeless men slowly shuffle past. Water and suds rimmed in brown soot from the Cactus Carwash roll down the street, past the tattoo parlor and toward the notorious Clermont Lounge, Atlanta’s oldest strip club. Once a residence and a hotel, the Clermont packs in the hipsters every Saturday night to see DJ Romeo Cologne spin his brand of funk, and a few of the original employees still strip. The club opened in 1955. You do the math.

If this gritty stretch of road could talk, it would tell tales of notorious drug deals, fuel rumors of a corpse found in a nearby grocery store parking lot, and relate stories of spunky upstarts taking over the area. Naturally no one would ever assume that the eight freight containers sitting in what most think is an abandoned parking lot is home to PodPonics, a hydroponic lettuce farm. Blink and you’ll miss them.

PodPonics is the brainchild of software developer Matt Liotta. Selling his telecommunications company enabled him to spend quality time with his first child, and he took over a lot of the grocery shopping duties from his wife.

“I walked into the produce section, read the labels and realized that so much of our food was being shipped to us from all parts of the world,” said Liotta. “My onions are from Peru? How much jet fuel was used to get them here?”

Looking for a new venture, Liotta began researching hydroponics and learned that most of the lettuce consumed in the United States is shipped from Salinas, Calif., a town that calls itself the salad bowl of the United States. He then designed a growing system for lettuce housed in recycled shipping containers and took the idea to investors. They were sold. Today, PodPonics produces over 200,000 heads of lettuce and arugula a year from this unassuming parking lot.

“The artwork we got for free,” Liotta laughed as he gestured toward the graffiti on one of the eight containers.

According to Liotta, a conventional lettuce farm produces 9,600 to 12,000 heads a year per acre. That acre of land is constantly watered, fertilized and is subject to damage from Mother Nature and pests. One PodPonics container is guaranteed to yield 26,559 heads. No chemicals are used; the temperature is controlled and watering is not necessary. Even better, the entire urban farm’s footprint is about 8,000 square feet. The science is so exact that the buyer’s contract includes a guarantee of the volume and price for one year.

“We’re also debunking the myth that organic lettuce in the grocery store today is better than ours,” explained Liotta. “That bag of lettuce was constantly watered, washed three times and probably in chlorine. Think of all the water that was used. PodPonics lettuce is not washed because there is no need. We use no pesticides and we’re not affected by changes in the weather. We’re not breaking down the soil either. We don’t need soil.”

Liotta and team are so confident of their ability to produce that they offer their customers a 100 percent guarantee on price and yield. That way, vendors know exactly what they’re getting and for what price. The product also has a longer shelf life than other lettuces and is truly tasty. PodPonics is distributed by Atlanta’s two largest produce vendors that sell to local restaurants such as 4th & Swift, Serpas True Food, Rathbun’s, Pura Vida, Farm Burger and Goin’ Coastal Seafood and retailers like Savi Urban Market and Market Across the Street. They also participate in the Atlanta Farmer’s Market.

“I went into Goin’ Coastal one night and ordered a salad. I was so thrilled when it arrived to the table as just this heaping bowl of my lettuce with the dressing on the side,” Liotta enthused.

Demand quickly began exceeding their expectations, and a second round of investing will allow PodPonics to relocate and expand to the Southside Industrial Park in Atlanta, where it will operate 100 pods. Expanding to Southside allows the business continued growth and makes use of land that has lain dormant for many years while creating jobs and opportunity to help revitalize the economically depressed southwestern area of Atlanta.

PodPonics’ long-term goal is to not only land in every grocery store in Georgia but all over the United States as well.

“Imagine that you could eat a spring mix of greens that was grown locally and named after your own town,” said Liotta. “It’s the future of farming and for us, the future is now.”