Jason Brown, Founder of FarmBox Foods - "Let's Just Build The Farm Inside The Container"
It all started with an affordable housing concept that never got off the ground. Jason Brown, a founding member of the FarmBox Foods team, was working on a project to build housing inside shipping containers. The plan included outdoor gardens in the form of vertically integrated, food-safe tubes (foreshadowing is a narrative device, etc.). As is not unusual in these situations, construction timelines and permitting challenges got in the way. "When we broke ground, we realized it took years before we could start," he says. "So let's just build the farm inside the container."
A few days later, he ordered a shipping container and started figuring it out.
That was 2017. Jason had spent years in construction, built large-scale grow rooms around Denver, and had a biology degree collecting dust from a career pivot he'd made when the theory clashed with the practice of monthly bills. "At the time I was having a kid," he says. "Biology didn't pay the bills." But not all that's been done is useless; sometimes it takes a bit of time for meaning to sprout. That degree turned out to be more essential than he expected. FarmBox Foods takes pre-insulated shipping containers, outfits them with custom-fabricated vertical hydroponic systems and purpose-built electrical infrastructure, and ships them to customers across 12 industries. "Nothing is off the shelf," Jason explains. "The hydroponic system is designed specifically to fit the container footprint, and so is the electrical layout."
For more information:
Agrowtek
3365 Gateway Rd, Brookfield, WI 53045
Phone: (847) 380-3009
Fax: (224) 538-2320
sales@agrowtek.com
agrowtek.com
FarmBox Foods
www.farmboxfoods.com
Publication date: Wed 15 Apr 2026