AppHarvest names CEA industry veteran Tony Martin as Chief Operating Officer

The sustainable food company, AppHarvest, Inc, has announced today it has named AppHarvest Board Member Tony Martin Chief Operating Officer, effective immediately.

Martin will retain his board seat, and as COO he will lead efforts to optimize production and revenue across the AppHarvest four-farm network that now includes 165 acres under glass.

“I expect Tony’s extensive background in controlled environment agriculture (CEA) and his track record for optimizing the efficiency of core operations and consistently achieving revenue growth will help us accelerate our path to profitability,” said Jonathan Webb, Founder & CEO, AppHarvest.

“AppHarvest is at an exciting inflection point transitioning from a construction and development mode to an organization focused on core operational excellence,” said Martin. “I believe AppHarvest has a tremendous opportunity to leverage its world-class CEA network at a time when both changing climate and major grocery retailers are demanding it. We’re working to ramp up production and revenue by ensuring efficient, cost-effective delivery of high-quality produce to major grocers and restaurants.”

Martin joined AppHarvest following a nearly 12-year career with Windset Farms, one of the largest CEA producers and marketers of indoor-grown crops in North America with more than 250 acres in the US and Canada. At Windset, he supported both significant infrastructure and revenue growth. Martin has served as a consultant in the CEA sector and is a board member of the Fruit & Vegetable Dispute Resolution Corporation, a non-profit that sets standards for the trade of fresh fruits and vegetables in Canada.

Martin earned his credential as a chartered professional accountant following a bachelor of commerce in accounting and finance and a graduate diploma in accounting, audit and taxation at Concordia University in Canada.

In what the company believes is the largest simultaneous build out of CEA infrastructure in US history, the company quadrupled the number of farms operating in its network in 2022. The company opened three more high-tech indoor farms – a 30-acre farm in Somerset, Kentucky, for strawberries and cucumbers and a 15-acre farm in Berea, Kentucky, for salad greens featuring a 'touchless growing system' with autonomous harvesting. AppHarvest is shipping strawberries under the 'WOW Berries' brand from nearly one million strawberry plants and a variety of salad greens for the 'Queen of Greens' washed-and-ready-to-eat salad packs. In its third season now, the AppHarvest Morehead farm has further diversified its crop set adding snacking tomatoes sold under the Sunset brand as 'Flavor Bombs' and 'Sugar Bombs'. Morehead began its harvesting this season ahead of schedule and is growing beefsteak tomatoes, tomatoes on the vine and snacking tomatoes.

According to USDA reports, the value of US fruit and vegetable imports rose to a record level in 2021 and has been projected to keep increasing in 2022. Changing weather patterns – ranging from mega-drought in the Southwest of the USA to more frequent flooding to catastrophic wind events – are making it harder than ever for open-field farmers to predict the duration of their growing seasons and to have conditions that result in a quality harvest. Major food retailers have demonstrated increasing interest in high-tech indoor farms for their ability to de-risk fruit and vegetable production with a more climate-resilient, more sustainable year-round growing solution that uses far fewer resources. Europe, a pioneer in the industry, is estimated to have nearly 520,000 acres of CEA production compared to an estimated 6,000 acres in the USA.