Eureka: No sun needed! How to grow fresh greens year-round 

0:15You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. Didrik Dimon is the co-founder and CEO of Auk, an award-winning indoor smart gardening system that makes it easy to grow fresh greens right there on your kitchen counter. Herbs, salads and even vegetables thrive year round, cared for by a neat Scandinavian-designed unit that's as handsome as it is practical. What began as a small seed of an idea in Norway has flourished, into a thriving business, now with more than 100 ,000 customers in more than 30 countries.

0:54So, how do you take a humble home garden concept and turn it into an international success story? And how do you balance sleek product design with the technical challenges of indoor agriculture? Well, here is Diedrich with more on how the journey began.

1:16the problem was here in norway especially northern part we have super long cold very dark winters and the growing season outdoors basically stops in like september you can't grow anything until april and we want to create something that we can do indoors during the winter and a couple very important things about out we wanted something that had the complete same sort of gardening freedom that you have in a regular garden. So in our, you can use your own seeds, our seeds, you can plant, cut things, transplant already grown herbs. And we wanted to create like this true open system. And we wanted to create something that would give us a continuous supply throughout the winter.

1:54So you spend a couple of weeks growing up, and then you could just harvest basically every day. And that culminated into us sort of starting from scratch, creating our dream product. And of course, coming from Scandinavia, we wanted something that we would be proud to have at this plane. Something that was beautiful and had that sort of iconic Scandinavian look. So blending all of those wishes together, together with a really long winter, AUK was born. Started with AUK1. That was our first product. Had that in the market for two and a half years. It was a big success here in Norway. Launched internationally, especially in the UK.

2:31And then we launched AUK Mini, which was our second generation hydroponic design, where it basically just made it cleaner, sleeker, easier to use, better growth, more beautiful. That was a short story, and now we're selling our products across the world, building this new category of indoor smart gardens.

2:53You need a bunch of things working together to create the perfect growing environment. And for the light, we have a full spectrum LED, so it has a lot of different wavelengths that the human eye can't see. but the plants need them. So we have deep, far red, which is what plants need in order to bloom. So for example, we have a custom chili and tomato mode, where we switch to more of the far red wavelength, very technical, but it's like very deep red light. That promotes blooming to make the plants bloom faster. And then for herbs and salads, we have whiter light, or more into the spectrum that the human eye can see, which promotes really good stem growth and long-lasting yields.

3:33So there's a lot to go into the light, and the light also needs to be on a certain distance away from the plant so it's adjustable all the way down to 10 centimeters above the pots and then you can raise them up to 50 centimeters to sort of support your plant throughout its growth. We have what is very important for us, the open system. So we use open pots, not like a closed system where you're tied into our seeds or our pots. You can use your own, you can plant cuttings, you can transplant already grown herbs. You can use your eggs to pre-cultivate in the early spring months. You can grow your tomatoes indoors, grow it to like 20-30 centimeters, and then plant it out in your garden once spring comes around.

4:12So it's just basically like unlimited what you can do. The way we refill water and nutrients also allows what we call the ever-growth system, where you can spend a couple of weeks growing up your plants from seeds to a grown plant and then harvest every day for several months. some plants can live up to a year straight. And all these things come together in a way that's super easy to use and, of course, pretty to look at. And that was our dream product, all these features coming together. We did the grandma test. So we had our grandma try the product without any help, and she succeeded growing our own herbs.

4:48So that was like the benchmark in the early stages of development. And we had, I mean, ourselves, busy entrepreneurs, engineers, and we lead busy lives. We didn't want to think at all about maintaining our ark. Just the whole automatic nature of it was something that's baked in from the very beginning. It should be 100 % of no-palate. And now we have customers about 2 % of population on Svalbard, which is an island almost at the North Pole in our way, where it's super cold. And even there, people are succeeding with growing their own herbs, even though it's super... I mean, there's just snow all year round.

5:22And even there, people are able to grow with it.

5:29We have one mission as a company that has to build the world's best products for this category. That's our single focus. That's what we go to work every day to achieve. And right now we have a lot of exciting things coming up for Outmini with new seeds, new packages. And we are also expanding heavily internationally. UK has been one of the fastest growing markets. One of the best receptions. I think we entered a UK market a year and a half ago and it's just growing so much. And we actually just opened a separate warehouse in the UK, in Birmingham, to just provide even better shipping. And then we have a lot of projects we're working on that we'll hopefully see the light of day sometime.

6:15That was Didrik Dimon, the co-founder and CEO of AUK. And you can learn more about the business by heading to AUK.com. That's AUK.com. And that's all for this episode of Eureka. We'll be back at the same time next week. The programme's produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars. You can listen again and find out more at monocle.com or follow us wherever you get your audio. And if you'd like to get in touch, do email Laura. She's on lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye and thanks for listening to Eureka.