When harvest meets high-tech

What if you flip the growing process, quite literally, upside down?

At SAIA Agrobotics, tomato plants don’t grow from the ground up, but from the top down. Hanging from above on moving tracks, every single plant travels through the greenhouse like a living production line.

Like a car through a wash, each plant passes sensors and robotic arms, its health, growth and ripeness are checked automatically. The result: each plant receives exactly what it needs, at precisely the right moment. This isn’t just a clever trick, it’s a revolution in how we grow food. Because by reducing manual work and making every movement count, SAIA cuts labour by half, while improving yields and consistency.

Growing a smarter future

Across the world, the demand for fresh fruit and vegetables is rising. But extreme weather, water scarcity and labour shortages are putting traditional farming under pressure. Indoor farming offers the solution, controlled environments, higher productivity, but to make it truly scalable, we need automation that works in harmony with nature. That’s where SAIA steps in. Their patented vertical growing system makes each plant moveable, visible and measurable from all sides.

The tomatoes hang from above on moving tracks

Robotic arms and sensors perform automated checks

SAIA’s approach is more than robotics, it’s a new production paradigm. By combining a patented vertical growing method with mobile plant carriers, AI-driven crop insight and the world’s fastest robotic harvester, the system automates repetitive, labour-intensive tasks. Results? Labour savings of around 50% today, with scope to exceed 80% once the platform scales. That makes high-tech greenhouse growing possible and affordable in more places, from family farms to large commercial growers.

SAIA champions a transition to data-driven, autonomous ‘food factories’ - modular greenhouses where plants move, data drives every decision, and robots harvest with millimetre precision. Born from Wageningen University & Research know-how, proven in a test greenhouse in the Netherlands, SAIA is moving indoor farming from promise to practice. Feeding more people sustainably means rethinking how we grow. Because feeding a growing world isn’t just about producing more, it’s about producing better.

Image credits: SAIA Agrobotics.