If you have flown Emirates since 2022, there is a fair chance your salad was grown in a vertical farm. Bustanica, a 330,000 square foot facility near Al Maktoum International in Dubai, is the world's largest indoor vertical farm, built to produce more than one million kilograms of leafy greens a year, roughly 3,000 kilograms every day.
The numbers behind it read like a manifesto for the region's food future: 95 percent less water than conventional agriculture, machine learning tuning the growing environment around the clock, and a team of agronomists, engineers and plant scientists in place of weather and luck. Emirates Flight Catering believed in the model enough to acquire the farm outright in 2024, and its produce now sits in major UAE retailers alongside the airline's trays.
The significance for the Gulf is bigger than salad. Bustanica proved that the region's most demanding buyer, an airline caterer serving millions of meals, will build its supply on controlled-environment agriculture when the quality and reliability are there.
Sheba Berry takes that same logic one course further: premium strawberries, one of the most delicate and prized items on any menu, grown in sealed vertical farms in Ethiopia, hours from the Gulf by air. The GCC already trusts vertical farming with its greens. The berry is next.
Reported figures via Emirates and Emirates Flight Catering announcements.
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