Urban Farming & Food · Greenly Feature
The Growhouse set out to feed One Life's kitchen from its own indoor farm. Two years in, the honest answer is more complicated than the pitch, and more interesting for it.
Most sustainability features lead with the win. This one leads with something more honest: running an indoor farm inside a working restaurant has not gone entirely to plan, and the team behind The Growhouse, One Life's indoor farm concept in Dubai Design District, will tell you that themselves.
According to the farm's most recent horticulture report, The Growhouse is currently home to five varieties of tomato, five varieties of basil, two varieties of mint, three varieties of lettuce, and a rotating list that includes kale, arugula, coriander, dill, Swiss chard, parsley, sage, rosemary, lemongrass, Cuban oregano, and nasturtium. Landscape plantings around the restaurant, two olive trees, a lemon tree, a kumquat tree, and flowering sweet potato vines along the signage, round out the growing space.
Where the story gets honest is in what the team told me directly. Running an indoor farm has been genuinely difficult. Without strong air circulation in the space, and having chosen not to use chemical pesticides, the farm has dealt with repeated plant infections. On top of that, the team came into indoor farming without prior experience, and as the restaurant's popularity grew faster than expected, a real gap opened up between how much the farm can produce and how much the kitchen actually needs.
"The truth is, operating an indoor farm has been challenging. We have been hit with multiple infections arising from a lack of air circulation in the space and because we have chosen not to use chemical pesticides. Further, as we were inexperienced in this field, and because the restaurant has taken off quite well, there is a huge gap between the quantities the farm can produce and what the kitchen requires. Having said that, everything we do produce goes to the kitchen but it is very much a work in progress."
Necip Camcigil, One Life Kitchen and Cafe
That last line matters. Nothing the farm produces goes to waste, it all reaches the kitchen. The farm simply can't yet grow at the scale the restaurant now needs, which is a different problem than the one most sustainability pitches admit to.
The Growhouse originally set out with ambitions to run as a zero waste operation. As Necip put it plainly, that hasn't been achieved. The one consistent sustainability measure currently in place across the concept is biodegradable packaging. There's no active food waste partnership or sourcing program running at the moment.
According to the farm's plan for the coming month, the focus is on fundamentals: keeping existing crops healthy, sowing new batches of herbs and leafy greens for continuous production, propagating more tomato seedlings, and closely monitoring conditions through the summer heat. Nothing dramatic, just the ongoing work of trying to get an indoor farm to reliably feed a restaurant that's grown bigger than the farm was built for.
About The Growhouse
The Growhouse is the indoor farm concept behind One Life Kitchen and Cafe, located in Building 5, Dubai Design District. Learn more at onelifedxb.com.