And So Is Vertical Farming

Jones Food Company, majority-owned by Ocado, entered administration and ceased operations at its Lydney site on 7 April 2025, with sixty-one staff made redundant and Ocado facing losses reported at up to £21.7 million.

GrowUp Farms’ holding company entered administration in December 2025 after raising around £140 million and posting a pre-tax loss of about £22.5 million on £2.9 million of revenue. Vertical Future was put up for sale in July 2025 after a loss of more than £10 million. Infarm exited the UK entirely in 2023.

The reason is energy. LED lighting is up to sixty per cent of the energy use, vertical farms use two to three times more energy per kilogram than a modern greenhouse, and UK commercial electricity runs at around twenty-two pence a kilowatt-hour with no energy-intensive-industry relief — against roughly a £34-per-megawatt-hour-equivalent advantage for Dutch and Belgian competitors.

A peer-reviewed floor of around ten dollars a kilogram of dry matter makes staple crops hopeless. Only leafy greens, herbs and strawberries come close to viability, and that market is saturated and loss-making.

So: a small glasshouse or polytunnel for premium shop lines and season extension. That is the only defensible controlled-environment spend on this farm, and anything more ambitious is setting money alight in a well-lit room.