The first-ever vegetables to be grown at Thanet Earth will go on sale this week, ahead of the expected arrival date of mid-April.
Shoppers at the Tesco Extra store in Broadstairs will be the first to enjoy product from the UK’s largest greenhouse complex, with cucumbers from the site to be hand-delivered to the shop on Wednesday by grower Addy Breugem from Dutch partner A&A Growers.
Produce from the Fresca-owned site, operated in conjunction with A&A and two other Dutch growers, is due to boost UK salad crop production by 15 per cent.
Other vegetables to be grown at the site, with planted area equal to the size of 25 football pitches, are tomatoes and peppers, all of which will be available as local Kent lines to Kent consumers and nationally across Tesco stores. They are due to be available in mid-April.
Tesco Local Sourcing marketing manager Philippa Anderson said: “It is great that we can offer our customers such a variety of locally grown Kent salad crops.
“Until now no British grower has ever been able to grow round the year salad produce because of the enormous cost of heating glasshouses. The opening of Thanet Earth makes that possible and our Kent customers will be the first to benefit. We are 100 per cent behind local produce and Thanet Earth is an incredible place.”
Thanet Earth managing director Steve McVickers told freshinfo: “Tesco is one of the big retailers we were keen to work with, as our strategies about local production matched.
“We have really good, bold green cues at the moment, which are a good example of the benefits of our hydroponic system and the incredible conditions here at Thanet, which have even taken aback our Dutch partners. We had excellent light levels in February, so we picked the cucumber crop just 28 days after planting. Next season we plan to plant cucumbers in December and hope to have product even earlier, by the end of January.”
Anderson added: “Thanet Earth is also significant because it will mean a major reduction in freighting salad over from the Netherlands, Spain and Morocco during the winter months. We want to buy as much as possible from the UK rather than importing.”
The £80 million, 91-hectare site’s greenhouses are heated by a gas-powered engine that generates large amounts of electricity, or Combined Heat and Power (CHP).
The greenhouses themselves require very little operational power, so almost all electricity is exported through a newly created link to the National Grid.
The by-products of the power generation process - heat and carbon dioxide - are taken into the greenhouses to support the natural growing process of the plants.
Thanet Earth has also created 700 jobs for local people in an area that has high unemployment.
Anderson added: “We are taking a large percentage of Thanet Earth’s total production of salad crops as we are committed to buying local and British, in turn reducing the need for imports.”
The green credentials of Thanet Earth were recently confirmed in a report by independent agriculture consultancy Bidwells Agribusiness, which found that peppers and cues grown on the site have very low emissions and a lower footprint than others grown by all alternative sources.
Other findings revealed that tomatoes grown without lights at the site are more carbon-efficient than various Mediterranean sources studied, while tomatoes grown there using lights have a similar carbon footprint to UK-produced tomatoes grown without lights or CHP.
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