When prompted to speak about some of the lessons he learned throughout his journey of building the company, Homberg touches upon the idea of balance. What comes to his mind is figuring out how to achieve equality when it comes to production and business. He detailed that if too much time and emphasis is put onto the production of the greens, then the business side of the company suffers and vice versa. In order to strike a balance that takes some of the pressure off of his workers, Homberg let me in on a little secret that seems like it should be more intuitive than it is: the importance of planning backwards. Because the workers know how long each stage of production takes for every variety that the company produces, they plan backwards to know when to seed in order to fulfill deliveries of each order on the promised harvest day. When the company receives and order from a chef, they immediately begin planning out each of the stages of growth. They know if variety x spends five days in germ and ten days out of germ then they would need a fifteen day lead time of the order to begin seeding on that day. If a restaurant orders variety x to be delivered weekly, then the company knows the timeframe in which seeding needs to happen to fulfill their order.

One thing that I look forward to seeing in the coming weeks is how they adapt to additions to orders. When out fulfilling a delivery, one of the chefs asked if they could receive an additional container of cilantro microgreens. We agreed and said we would love to talk more about updating their order for the next week. I will follow up on this and ask what they did or will be doing in order to deliver on their changed order.