Fresh ingredients all year round!
We want to enable you to grow your own herbs, vegetables and flowers, without any work. Meet APPA, your Automated Plant Production Assistant!
With APPA, you don’t need to limit yourself to the vegetables and herbs you find in the supermarket. Just plant a seed (or cutting) that you like, and APPA will take care of the rest. No gardening experience or lots of effort are required! Your fresh ingredients are just waiting to be served, all year round.
With this, we want to provide an alternative to harmful agricultural practices and give an option that is clean and efficient, reduces emissions and chemical pollution, and saves water and nutrients.
APPA supplies light, water and nutrients to your plants automatically. All you need to do is:
Step 1: Put your seeds (or cuttings) in the grow medium.
Step 2: Fill up the water-nutrient solution roughly once every two weeks.
Step 3: Watch your plants grow and enjoy the delicious harvest!
As a hydroponic system, APPA needs no soil to work, which makes it clean and easy to handle. A water-nutrient solution is sprayed directly onto the plant roots, which enables faster plant growth than in soil, while less water and nutrients are needed!
Most of our team members are former ETH scientists, and we take great care to test and refine our systems continuously and make research-based improvements for better plant growth.
Unique and innovative.
Our product is 100% designed and engineered in Switzerland. And it is built in Switzerland too! We work with the APPISBERG competence centre, where people with impairments are trained to become skilled professionals in carpentry, electronics and many other professional fields. They build our APPAs with the highest standard and make a great social impact at the same time.
We have also developed an innovative new light design that can mimic natural daylight cycles, featuring smooth sequences of warm dawn-and-dusk light and bright midday light. In order to ensure that our lights are efficient and potent, we collaborate with Agroscope, the Swiss centre of excellence for agricultural research, and are supported by Innosuisse, the Swiss innovation agency. Together, we conduct experiments to show that our lights speed up plant growth compared to other grow lights on the market.
WE WANT TO IMPROVE PLANT PRODUCTION EVERYWHERE!
Our goal is to provide an alternative to current damaging agricultural operations. In the fields, our food is grown in huge monocultures that waste water and nutrients. About 70% of global freshwater consumption is used in agriculture, yet in many countries over 50% of this water is wasted. Much of Switzerland’s soil is polluted and non-renewable within a human timeframe and Swiss groundwater is contaminated with pesticides and fertilisers. Of the produce, 2.8 million tonnes of food are wasted in Switzerland alone every year.
With efficient indoor growing techniques, many of these negative aspects can be countered. Hydroponic systems, such as APPA, need up to 90% less water and 60% less nutrients compared to traditional farming, because these resources are cycled, reused and delivered to the plants in the most efficient way. Plants grow faster, because they don’t have to search or compete for resources. And, in sheltered indoor environments, no pesticides or herbicides are needed.
With our technology, we want to enable YOU to grow more of your own food and eliminate more transports, packaging, CO2-emissions and food waste. But we also want to contribute to the indoor farming community in general, to make automated farming efficient and future-proof.
Thanks to you, we all can grow!
With your help, we can produce the first 100 new APPAs and find them new homes! Hardware is expensive, especially when it’s locally produced, which is why we have to order in bulk. After months of development, collaboration with our research and production partners, product safety tests, and feedback from customers on our pilot product, our new and improved APPA is ready. With your support, we will be able to give the order of this first larger batch to our production partner APPISBERG.
After the campaign, we will be able to order all necessary components, produce and deliver the first APPAs within 3-5 months. Your support will also enable us to extend our communication and bring more sustainable food production into Swiss and European homes. We want to not only deliver future-proof products, but also educate and contribute know-how. Your support will enable us to spread our knowledge and build up the home grow community with online support, newsletters, events and workshops.
We’re a team of young, motivated alumni from Swiss universities. We have experience from our first product launch and great advisors and partners in the industry, and we’ve allocated sufficient resources and time to deliver your APPAs on time. However, we know that there may be things outside of our control and current visibility. This includes both our supply chain and the design, for which we reserve the right to make small changes compared to the images shown here. We promise to keep you informed, both during the campaign and afterwards, and do our absolute best to deliver your APPAs in a timely manner. As can be confirmed by our current customers, transparency is one of our core values and fully reflects within this crowdfunding campaign.
For more information, pictures, and articles, come visit our website www.pleasantplants.com ! Especially have a look at our FAQ section!
Thank you so much for your support.
