CHICAGO (WLS) — A nearly 100-year-old building recycled and redefined.
“Everybody says the greenest building is an old building because we’re not tearing it down.,” said John Edel, Founder and Director of Bubbly Dynamics and The Plant.
The Plant, as it’s called now, was a former meatpacking facility in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood. But instead of a crumbling, old plant, Edel had a vision of sustainability and innovation.
“There’s a great deal of embodied energy in a building like this that we should be taking advantage of, not wiping it off the face of the earth and starting fresh again, because that’s a very inefficient way to do things,” said Edel. “The correct way is to fix what we have, not just throw it away.”
A former set designer. Edel has injected nature and jobs right back into the 100,000 square foot structure.
“We call it a living laboratory,” Edel said. “And so it’s a business incubator for small food businesses where we work to extract the output of one process and make it the input of another.”
Besides being environmentally responsible, each of the 19 businesses also has a unified goal of giving back to the community.
“We created about 100 food manufacturing jobs in this facility alone and most of those people live within quick transit or walking distance of the building. Lots of them ride bicycles,” said Edel.
Some of those employees are local chemists who are busy reimagining the future of our food systems.
“That could be lab grown meats, it can be mycelial products, it can be harm reduction, it can be a wide range of different directions,” said Edel.
And as the building continues to evolve. Edel said he encourages other companies to replicate The Plant’s business model.
“We are doing this because we see a need, and we see a warming planet, we see stratification in economic terms of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer and we see a need to reuse what we have,” said Edel.
Businesses brewing inside The Plant
More than 100 people head to The Plant every day. A mix of entrepreneurs, researchers and growers – they all have one thing in common.
“It’s all food adjacent,” said Edel.
That makes sense, since The Plant was an old pork packing smokehouse.
“We like to start with little, tiny companies that have good ideas that are planning to grow 100 percent food or food research,” said Edel.
The Plant houses 19 small businesses. ABC7 got an inside look at three of them.
Located in the basement, Closed Loop Farms is busy growing micro greens for home delivery, as well as for nearly 200 local restaurants.
“Essentially, a micro green is a shoot,” explained Maggie Dohr, Closed Loops Farms operation manager. “So instead of growing a full stock of broccoli you grow the microgreen which is just when you see the first couple set of leaves and it’s going to hold a lot of the same nutrition and taste and flavor.
Closed Loop Farms grows outdoors during the summer months but their indoor growing process allows them to harvest year-round. That keeps their product local, while reducing their carbon footprint.
“Chefs look to us to add this flavor, a little specialty, a little flare to their dishes, to really make their dishes stand out,” said Dohr. “And they can access it locally and we harvest it one day before delivery so that they can guarantee they are getting the freshest product in really is going to have the best shelf life.”
Moving on to the sweeter side of The Plant, Mez Foods is on the second floor.
Mez Foods is a chocolate alternative company.
“We use mesquite beans instead of coco beans,” said Mez Foods co-founder Bob Schultz. “So, there’s no coco butter, no coco powder, we just use mesquite beans and a blend of a couple ingredients to get that nice chocolatey indulgence .”
Mesquite is often associated with wood for barbecue but mesquite trees also produce little edible bean pods which are the base of their “un-chocolate” product.
“It has this incredible kind of cinnamony, coconutty chocolate flavor to it,” explained Schultz.
And mesquite takes a lot less energy to grow than chocolate.
“The mesquite tree itself grows in the desert, so just by nature of where it grows, needs very little water,” said Schultz. “I’s actually a legume , like soy or peas, and those kinds of plants allow you to fix nitrogen into the earth, so it revitalizes the land that it grows on.
The tour ended with a visit to Whiner Beer Company on the first floor.
Brian Taylor is the co-owner and brewmaster at Whiner Beer. And like all the other businesses in The Plant, they’ve created ways to give back to each other.
“We’ve developed a CO2 collection system at our fermenter that sends spent CO2 from fermentation up to the Algea Company where the algea converts that CO2 back into oxygen so there’s zero emissions on our fermentations,” said Taylor. “We came up with it and we’re not geniuses by any stretch.”
But they just might be geniuses in the beer-making department. Whiner is known for its sours. Their flagship beer is Le Tub. And now they’re dipping into non-alcoholic beverages, too.
ABC7 only got a quick taste of The Plant but it’s clear that all the businesses interconnect, sharing resources and the same planet-saving mindset.
“Look, if a bunch of people with no resources coming into this can make money behaving responsibly, then what is corporate America’s excuse for not doing better,” said Edel. “We can do a lot better.”
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