Stacked Farm's $150 million vertical farm at Melbourne Airport bets that the world's biggest by volume will succeed where dozens of others have failed.
In early 2025, construction crews broke ground on a 10,000-square-metre warehouse at Melbourne Airport's new Tullamarine land precinct. Inside, when it opens in mid-2026, there will be no soil, no sunlight, no seasons, and almost no people. There will be 25 proprietary robots moving trays of spinach, basil, and cos lettuce through a fully automated cycle from seed to sealed bag - with just 15 staff members overseeing the whole operation. The project is Stacked Farm's $150 million Melbourne facility, and it is poised to become the world's largest indoor vertical farm by output - producing 3.4 million kilograms of fresh herbs and leafy greens each year, in a country that has long struggled with the cost and reliability of getting fresh produce to plates.
The man behind the project has a story that makes the farm itself seem almost modest by comparison. Daniel Tzvetkoff, who founded Stacked Farm in 2016 alongside his wife Liz, spent the previous chapter of his life as a cautionary tale. As the founder of global transactions company Intabill, Tzvetkoff processed over $543 million in funds for online poker companies in the US, where internet gambling was illegal. The business collapsed in 2009. He was arrested in 2010, facing 75 years on charges of bank fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy. He avoided prison by turning informant, helping the FBI shut down the operations of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker. His story was later turned into a book, Alligator Blood, published by Simon & Schuster.
What followed was quieter. Tzvetkoff returned to the Gold Coast, started a family, and developed an unlikely obsession with hydroponics. What began as a home experiment became, by 2017, a 400-square-metre research and development facility in Burleigh Heads. By 2021, the company had outgrown it, relocating to a larger site in Arundel, Queensland, spanning 6,588 square metres, with 2,144 square metres dedicated to farming. The first harvest at that facility was completed in January 2024. Stacked Farm's Arundel operation reached full capacity that year, supplying leafy greens and herbs to clients including Grill'd, Fishbowl, and Nandos - and developing a bespoke lettuce variety for Grill'd that yields 70 burger servings per kilogram compared to 50 from standard varieties.
The company has received investment from institutional entities Magnetar Capital, a US-based alternative assets manager, and Tribeca Capital, as well as strategic supply chain investors including Morco Fresh, Tayside Investments (the parent of PFD Food Services), and PMFresh. The $56 million capital raise completed in 2022, backed by Australian and US investors, was earmarked for a second major facility - either Brisbane or Melbourne. Melbourne won. CBRE negotiated the lease with Melbourne Airport, which developed the purpose-built premises as part of the 150,000-square-metre Tullamarine precinct.
The choice of Melbourne Airport as the site for the farm is deliberate and pointed. Airports sit at the centre of distribution networks - surrounded by roads, freight infrastructure, and cold chain logistics that most industrial zones lack. Melbourne Airport's chief of ground transport, property and retail, Jai McDermott, described the decision as fitting: there was no other business like it anywhere in Australia.
Vertical farms have typically been placed in industrial zones, ex-warehouses, and suburban outskirts - chosen for cheap square footage rather than supply chain proximity. Stacked Farm's logic inverts that calculus: by locating inside the Tullamarine precinct, the facility is positioned to minimize the distance between harvest and distribution, reducing both food miles and spoilage risk. The company claims its produce stays fresh for up to 18 days - roughly twice the shelf life of conventionally grown greens, a fact it says is independently verified. Crop cycles run 16 to 31 days from seed to bag, compared to 45 to 80 days in traditional field farming. The facility operates 365 days a year, regardless of heat, drought, flood, or frost.
For Australia, these guarantees carry particular weight. The country has experienced acute fresh produce supply disruptions in recent years - food inflation peaked at 9.8 percent in March 2023, with a 2.4 percent spike in fruit and vegetable prices driven by adverse growing conditions and ongoing supply chain pressure. Australian vegetable growers remain under significant cost pressure even as retail farmgate values partially recover. The disruptions have been compounded by labor shortages, input cost inflation, and an agricultural system heavily dependent on weather in regions far from major population centres.
The facility is fully automated from seed to bag via 25 pieces of proprietary robotics, covering seeding, germination, tray management, harvesting, and packaging. The AI-driven system monitors lighting, water, and nutrients with real-time precision. The lighting technology is 47 percent more energy-efficient than industry standard, and the facility runs entirely on green energy with a zero-waste water system. Crops grow in stacked PVC trays filled with a basalt growing medium, using a mixture of white, red, and blue LED lighting tuned to optimize growth rate, flavour, and nutritional composition. The system uses 95 percent less water than conventional farming.
Sam Canavan, Stacked Farm's chief operating officer, has been direct about what sets the company apart from its overseas peers. High operating costs - including buying expensive off-the-shelf robotics and hiring hundreds of high-salaried horticulturalists, scientists, and engineers - have saddled many venture capital bets with unsustainable models. Stacked Farm manufactures its own farming equipment in-house and has built its technology stack from the ground up. It operates with 15 staff members rather than the hundreds employed by many of its now-defunct American counterparts.
The Melbourne facility has been designed with Total Construction as head contractor, engaged under an Early Contractor Involvement model since August 2023. The design process involved site investigations, planning permits, and weekly steering meetings with Melbourne Airport before construction began in January 2025.
Stacked Farm is not building into a vacuum. The vertical farming industry has spent the last three years generating one of the more spectacular sequences of failure in modern agtech. Companies that had collectively raised nearly $2 billion in venture capital have gone bankrupt or shut down operations entirely. Bowery Farming, once valued at $2.3 billion and backed by $700 million in venture capital, ceased all operations in late 2024 after struggling with weak demand and plant disease outbreaks. Plenty Unlimited, which had raised $940 million from investors including SoftBank and Jeff Bezos, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March 2025. AeroFarms, one of the sector's pioneers, went through bankruptcy proceedings in 2023 after raising over $300 million. AppHarvest followed. So did Fifth Season, Kalera, and others. By mid-2025, fourteen controlled environment agriculture companies had filed for bankruptcy.
The pattern was consistent: raise enormous sums, build showcase facilities, assume the market would absorb the output. Many operators built capacity capable of producing millions of pounds of leafy greens per year only to discover that retail buyers already had supply relationships and were not eager to disrupt them. Energy costs were often crushing - with monthly electricity bills reaching between $10,000 and $20,000 even for smaller operations. Canavan has acknowledged this landscape openly, framing it as a cautionary tale that Stacked Farm studied carefully. The company's proprietary technology, in-house manufacturing, and phased scaling approach - starting with the Arundel facility, proving the model, then expanding to Melbourne - is the direct counterargument to that playbook. The Arundel farm's successful first harvest in January 2024 and its trajectory to full capacity over the following year provided a real-world proof of concept before the Melbourne capital was committed.
The company has also been recognized externally. In 2023 it ranked third in the Australian Financial Review's Most Innovative Companies list in the Agriculture, Mining and Utilities category. It was included in the FoodTech 500 top list for 2024 and was named one of TIME magazine's World's Top GreenTech Companies 2025 - an award given to just 250 companies globally. In late 2025, Stacked Farm won the Food and Agritech Award at the InnovationAus Awards for Excellence.
The Melbourne facility is described by the company as the first large-scale indoor vertical farm in an airport precinct in the Southern Hemisphere, and only the second globally. When it opens in mid-2026, it will test whether Stacked Farm's approach can survive at a scale no Australian operation has previously attempted - six times the size of the Arundel farm, with a production target of 3.4 million kilograms a year.
Beyond Melbourne, the company has indicated ambitions for further Australian expansion into Brisbane and Sydney, as well as an emerging US presence, with an office already established in Los Angeles. Tzvetkoff has previously signaled interest in taking the Stacked Farm model to North America - a market that has already proven hostile to the vertical farming ventures of others, but where a company that manufactures its own robotics, operates with a fraction of the headcount, and enters with a working proof of concept may find different ground.
The harder question is whether the economics hold at scale. The global vertical farming market was valued at $5.5 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $20 billion by 2030, growing at roughly 25 percent annually - but that growth sits against an industry where profitability at the product, farm, and corporate level has remained elusive for most players. Stacked Farm's COO has argued that the company can produce herbs like rocket, basil, coriander, and parsley at the same price or cheaper than traditional farms, with a smaller environmental footprint and a longer shelf life. That claim, if it holds under the pressure of a 10,000-square-metre facility producing 3.4 million kilograms a year, will be the most consequential thing to emerge from the Tullamarine precinct since the airport itself.