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Cultivating abundance and nurturing communities
Food Ladder and IBM empower populations with year-round access to fresh, nutritious produce
Targeting food inequality and scaling for abundance
Born out of the realization that food security and accessibility to fresh, nutritious food are not universal, Food Ladder, an award-winning nonprofit organization, set out to remedy the problem. For thirteen years, Food Ladder has been empowering remote and disadvantaged communities to grow and thrive through sustainable gardening initiatives and education. They have achieved it by developing compact, climate-controlled, commercial hydroponic and greenhouse systems that can be installed anywhere.
By integrating innovative gardening technology into schools and offering thousands of educational resources linked to the schools’ curriculum, the Food Ladder School System enables teachers to engage students in hands-on learning experiences within the greenhouses. This approach not only improves educational outcomes but also results in a bountiful supply of fresh produce. In fact, one greenhouse can supplement 85,000 meals, transforming a community’s food supply from scarce to abundant.
Having set up in every state and territory in Australia before expanding operations into several remote areas in Bhutan, India and Uganda, Food Ladder faced a new problem—meeting the demand. One small team, though smart and agile, was responsible for physically traveling to each individual location, setting up the technology and training teachers. With over 400 schools in need of the Food Ladder system, the organization could not sustain this level of expansion. Recognizing the potential to tap into technology and AI to scale but worrying about losing the personal touch that defined their approach, Food Ladder turned to IBM.
Food Ladder, in collaboration with IBM Client Engineering, identified key areas for AI-driven advancement. In approximately two and a half months, they developed AI-powered solutions built with IBM® watsonx.ai™ and IBM watsonx Assistant™ to significantly enhance the user experience.
Some of the most crucial transformations include:
- The team is utilizing IBM watsonx™ solutions to streamline and automate tedious processes, revolutionizing the process of requesting Food Ladder services. As things were, teachers were making after-hours phone calls, waiting on the line, filling out paperwork and dedicating personal time to these tasks. Now, teachers will be able to submit requests at any time, allowing them to complete the whole process in less than an hour.
- The onboarding process for schools is being improved, particularly those in regional and remote areas. When receiving their greenhouse from Food Ladder, teachers often have numerous questions and concerns. IBM Client Engineering developed a chat agent to guide teachers through the onboarding process, helping replace the labor-intensive process that consumed significant staff resources.
- The team chose the IBM watsonx to generate lesson plans and classroom activities aligned with the learning objectives of the curriculum. Teachers will no longer need to spend hours creating customized learning experiences aligned to curriculum outcomes, as the AI-generated plans will ensure an immersive and captivating classroom environment to enable students of all backgrounds and abilities to engage and learn.
When Food Ladder approached IBM with several use cases that needed to be automated, Kelly McJannett, CEO and Co-founder of Food Ladder notes being surprised at how quickly the IBM team proposed a solution. IBM watsonx could be used across all use cases, as opposed to leveraging multiple technologies. “For us, going into the AI-space, trying to go from 40 schools to potentially changing the way the world eats, this has massively simplified our path,” says McJannett.
Accelerating food security with AI-powered automation
Although she had concerns that embedding AI into a hands-on, collaborative learning experience would minimize the warm and personal touch that Food Ladder’s beneficiaries greatly appreciate, McJannett now understands the opposite to be true. “This transformation will make for an enriching experience on both sides—the teaching side and the internal staff side. The teachers can get their evenings back. They get to do what’s really important to teaching, which is social support and understanding the needs of the individual child; not the mundane stuff like applying math lessons to the curriculum and the various bits of paperwork that go along with that. For our staff, it will give them back the capacity to do the more important work, which is to ideate, create and improve the offering and the platform. They can deliver better value to teachers, as opposed to just doing the automated process of making sure governance structures and such are in place,” she says.
Food Ladder is transitioning from an organization where everything is done by hand, to a fully automated system that enables schools to build, understand and harvest their own food systems, and connect with other schools. Food Ladder currently operates in 40 schools across Australia, and in a few locations across India, Bhutan and Uganda. As of 2024, through the Food Ladder School System, the organization touched around 17,000 people and produced 132,480 meals annually. Through their collaboration with IBM, Food Ladder intends to scale to over 25 million meals annually by 2030, by implementing over 1,000 AI-powered smart food production hubs across the world.
At this scale, communities will have year-round supply of fresh, nutritious fruit and vegetables, which they never had before. Working with food makes children look at food differently, improving their long-term relationship with food. Additionally, Food Ladder greenhouses grow produce more efficiently than ground-based systems. Thus, given the remote locations of many Food Ladder greenhouses, the organization is helping reduce some of the longest, carbon-heavy supply chains in the world, greatly improving sustainability metrics. “It just brings us so much joy to deliver these incredible projects with this level of amplification and magnitude, which we can do on a much grander scale now. With IBM and our tech partners, we’ll revolutionize food security in just 6 years,” says McJannett.
Food Ladder (link resides outside of ibm.com) empowers children and communities to grow their own fresh produce, improving food security, health and economic opportunities, using AI-enabled hydroponic greenhouses in a sustainable initiative that is fully integrated into schools. Based in Australia, Food Ladder was founded by Kelly McJannett and Alex Shead, with the goal of addressing food insecurity holistically and providing education in underprivileged communities at scale.
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