I was supposed to be writing about a box. A 40-foot metal box that grows lettuce. Seriously, that's the assignment. Some company called Verde Compacto, co-founded by a guy named Juan Gabriel Succar, is cranking out these container farms, and I'm supposed to tell you if it's the future of food or just another tech-bro fantasy.
But I can’t.
Because every time I type "Juan Gabriel" into a search bar, my screen explodes with sequins, mariachi, and power ballads. I’m drowning in results for canciones de juan gabriel. I'm getting deep dives on juan gabriel amor eterno and conspiracy theories about whether juan gabriel is alive. My algorithm, the one I've painstakingly trained to feed me stories about venture capital flameouts and dystopian gadgets, now thinks I'm a superfan of a deceased Mexican pop icon.
This is the internet we live in now. A place where a guy trying to do basic research on a hydroponics system gets firehosed with links to a juan gabriel netflix special. It's impossible to untangle the two. Is the universe trying to tell me something? Or is this just the logical endpoint of SEO brain rot?
Let's try to focus. The box. It's called the Huvster Pro. It's a 40-foot shipping container that uses about 65 liters of water and a whopping 190 kWh of energy per day to grow stuff. They claim it can pump out around 100 kg of full-head lettuce or 50 kg of basil a week. All managed by some proprietary software called "Eden Smart Control," because of course it is. You can't sell a tech product in 2024 without giving it a name that sounds like a rejected Bond villain's master plan.
The clients are exactly who you'd expect: stadiums, fancy resorts, and municipalities who want a shiny new toy to show off in their sustainability brochures. Universities like La Salle and Panamericana are even buying them to let students poke at the future of agronomy. It all sounds so neat and tidy.
But then you look at the price tag. Monthly operating costs start around two grand, not including the $300-$350 you'll be dropping on seeds and nutrients. The company projects a return on investment of 3-4 years in the U.S. and 4-5 years in Mexico. For a resort that charges $800 a night, that's pocket change. For anyone else? It's a hell of a commitment for some hyper-local lettuce.
This whole thing is a bad idea. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of boutique solutionism. We're talking about a system that costs thousands a month to operate, requires specialized financing partners, and consumes the daily energy equivalent of several homes, all to grow a salad.
It reminds me of those ridiculous $400 Wi-Fi-enabled juicers from a few years back. A massively over-engineered solution to a problem that doesn't exist, sold to people with more money than sense. We already have a free, high-powered fusion reactor in the sky that grows plants with zero electricity. It's called the sun. But I guess that's not disruptive enough.
And then you get to the quote from the co-founder himself, Juan Gabriel Succar. Brace yourself. He says, "The system adds intangible value, turning sustainability into a business strategy and a market advantage.”
Let me translate that for you from the original corporate PR-speak: "This box is an expensive piece of performance art. Put it on your property, slap your logo on it, and you can sell your customers a story about how much you care about the planet." It's sustainability as a luxury good. It's a green status symbol, the agricultural equivalent of a Tesla parked in the driveway of a 10,000-square-foot mansion.
The part that really gets me, the part that's been making my eye twitch for the past hour, is the absolute digital chaos this has caused. I'm trying to find hard numbers on Verde Compacto's manufacturing capacity—they claim five to seven units a month—and instead I'm reading fan theories about rocio durcal y juan gabriel. I just want to know if the ROI numbers hold up under scrutiny, and my screen is showing me clips from a juan gabriel concert at Bellas Artes. It's maddening. It feels like the digital world is actively conspiring to keep me from finding the truth, burying it under a mountain of algorithmically-prioritized pop culture nostalgia. Offcourse, maybe that's the point.
This entire venture feels less like a serious attempt to solve food security and more like a beautifully packaged product for the "conscious capitalism" crowd. And people are buying it. They see the clean white box and the glowing purple lights and the perfect, pest-free lettuce, and they sign the check. They don't see the energy bill or the carbon footprint of manufacturing and shipping a 40-foot steel container, and honestly...
Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one. Maybe I'm just too cynical. A resort in the middle of a desert using this to grow its own greens is probably better than flying them in from thousands of miles away. Maybe. I don't know. What I do know is that my targeted ads are now exclusively for sombreros and compilation albums of juan gabriel exitos. This ain't progress.
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Just Another Shiny Box
At the end of the day, that's all this is. It’s not a revolution. It’s not going to feed the hungry or fix our broken food systems. It’s a beautifully marketed, energy-hungry appliance for businesses that want to purchase a story. It’s a product that allows you to look sustainable without having to do the hard, systemic work of actually being sustainable. And in a world that values appearances over substance, that makes it a guaranteed hit.
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