Shoots to Thrill

Every business has an origin story. Ours involves a near-miss, a double garage, a global pandemic and a former mushroom farm. Welcome to the Lusso Leaf journal, and to the story of how we got here.

A change of direction

We're Richard and Sarah Kennedy, husband and wife, and the two people behind Lusso Leaf.

For more than thirty years Richard worked in IT, mostly for start-ups, selling leading-edge software to FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 businesses. It was high-value, consultancy-led business development, with all the stress that goes with it. Then a near-fatal health condition stopped him in his tracks. Recovery was long, and somewhere along the way it became clear that life after illness was going to look different.

During that time Richard started growing his own fruit and vegetables, but not in the way most people do. No soil, no compost, no mud. Just water, dissolved nutrients and carefully balanced pH. Hydroponics turned from a hobby into a fascination, and the fascination turned into a question: what would happen if you combined a passion for growing with a career's worth of experience in technology?

The answer was a vertical farm run on the Internet of Things, where light, humidity, airflow, watering and nutrients are measured, tuned and controlled for every variety we grow.

Recruiting the boss

The first major challenge wasn't technical. It was persuading Sarah to join.

Sarah is a fitness instructor and, by universal agreement, CEO of the Kennedy household. She took on front of house for Lusso Leaf: finding our clients, looking after those relationships, and building our social media and marketing. That freed Richard to focus on everything behind the scenes, which turned out to be a long list: software, building racks, lighting, hydroponics, micro-electronics, electrical work, plumbing, chemistry, and making the tea.

A little rock'n'roll

From the start we wanted our produce to stand out. Microgreens can be a serious, technical business, and we take the growing very seriously indeed, but we didn't see why it couldn't also be a bit sexy and a lot of fun. We wanted a little rock'n'roll to set us apart from the big names in the sector.

Hence "Shoots to Thrill", a nod to a certain famous rock song. That theme runs through our range too, from Purple Rain to Little Green Bag and Pretty in Pink, and if you spot the references, you're our kind of chef.

From garage to launch, and straight into lockdown

We began testing ideas in 2019 with a small build-out in a converted double garage. During our research we sat down with a couple of local restaurants in Stockbridge to find out what chefs really wanted from a microgreens supplier: flavour, freshness, shelf life and consistency.

We officially launched a few weeks before the first Covid-19 lockdown. For a brand-new business built to supply restaurants, watching every hospitality venue in the country close its doors was not part of the plan.

So we pivoted. We turned to retail and home deliveries to keep going, and in hindsight that difficult year gave us something valuable: time. Time to make plenty of mistakes, learn from every one of them, perfect our growing techniques, and get the technology right so our produce had the quality, longevity and consistency we were aiming for.

Back in business and out of space

When hospitality reopened, those two Stockbridge restaurants we'd interviewed became our first hospitality clients. Several more restaurants and a couple of retailers quickly followed, and before long we'd run out of garage.

We were lucky enough to find a site that had previously been used for growing mushrooms, at Meon Hill Farm just outside Stockbridge. It's where Lusso Leaf has grown ever since, and it's where every leaf, shoot and edible flower we sell is still grown, harvested and packed today.

What we care about

Everything we do comes back to the things those first chefs told us mattered. We grow for flavour rather than yield, dialling in light, pH and nutrients for each variety. We harvest close to dispatch, so produce reaches your kitchen fresh rather than days old. And our climate control keeps conditions steady, so what you plate in January tastes the same in July.

What's next

Our ambitions are simple: to keep growing (pun fully intended), to extend our range of speciality produce for chefs, to find a place of our own to support that growth, and to build a reputation as a supplier worthy of the very best restaurants.

This journal is where we'll share what we're growing, how we're growing it, and what chefs are doing with it. Thanks for reading, and for being part of the story so far.

Richard & Sarah