S7E89: Zale Tabakman / Local Grown Salads - The Importance of Unit Metrics & Scaling to Support the Goal of Providing McDonald's With Indoor Grown Salads

Episode Summary

In this episode, you’ll hear Zale Tabakman's inspiring journey of revolutionizing the way we think about farming. Zale shares his vision for providing locally grown, ready-to-eat salads to a global market, as well as his patent-pending technology for growing 60 different vegetables. He emphasizes the potential of vertical farming to create good-paying jobs, address the climate crisis, and provide consistent high-quality salads to McDonald's at all 35,000 locations worldwide. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in innovative solutions and sustainable agriculture.

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Key Takeaways

• Learn how Zale’s interest began with a personal goal of finding healthy food options for his children, which led him to explore the potential of vertical farming.
• How Local Grown Salads focuses on scalability and sells its technology to farmers who can operate under the company's branding and procedures or as a private label.
• Zale’s ultimate goal is to service McDonald's by selling them salads at all 35,000 locations around the world, with consistent taste and quality.
• Zale’s focus on increasing yield rather than reducing the cost of electricity, and looks at how to reduce costs by focusing on the pennies that get repeated over and over again.
• Why Zale believes that indoor vertical farming is a solution to the climate crisis and a way to create good-paying jobs in urban areas and food deserts.
• How Local Grown Salads is leading the way in the indoor vertical farming industry with a patent-pending technology capable of growing 60 different vegetables.

Tweetable Quotes

“I’m always failing, but I'm always failing forward. My time of history that I love is the 1860s to the early 1920s, and the number of guys who have been very successful in massive failures are just unbelievable.”

“So I'm riding my bicycle, we're running around, I'm seeing all these roofs. And then I did a little bit of market research. I said, well, why don't we just grow the stuff on the roofs of buildings, right?”

“My goal is actually to service McDonald's. I want to keep the end in mind. I want to be the guy that sells to McDonald's 35,000 locations around the world, salads every day. And when you eat salad in Tokyo, it'll taste exactly as the same salad as in Toronto or in LA or in Paris. That, to me, is scale, right?”

“Most people focus in on reducing the cost of electricity. That's dumb. It's really, really dumb. They really do like Zale and focus in on how to increase the yield for every kilowatt of electricity you're using. They're looking at the wrong formula.”

“The future is incredibly rosy. Okay, so people are screwed up and big deal. They had too much money, they wasted the money. They got themselves nice cars and whatever, but the industry is going there. There are people who are growing. There are people who are selling.”

Resources Mentioned

Zale's Website - http://LocalGrownSalads.com & https://igrownews.com/agtech-companies/local-grown-salads/

Zale's Linkedin - https://LinkedIn.com/in/ZaleTabakman

Zale's Email - [email protected]

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Mentioned in this episode:

2025 Precision Ag Report by iGrowNews

2025 Precision Ag Report

2025 Precision Ag Report by iGrowNews

2025 Precision Ag Report