Caulys
Urban agriculture, a major challenge for the 21st century
Caulys was founded in 2019 by Grégoire Gentile and Vincent Keller, following research projects conducted at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Passionate about sustainable culture, technology and entrepreneurship, they decided to create and launch the Caulys adventure.
Its mission is to promote short circuits by bringing modular, automated and connected vegetable gardens into your homes and to restaurants. Its objective: to grow our own herbs and microgreens that take between 1 and 3 weeks depending on the species.
Worldwide, the fresh vegetables we eat every day travel an average of 2,000 km.
This has a negative impact on :
- Quality (long delay between harvest and consumption that have as consequences abusive use of chemicals, production methods focused on yields rather than quality and health)
- Sustainability (transport, packaging, food waste),
- Value for money (middlemen, complex supply chain, food waste).
To solve this problem, Caulys was created to bring agriculture back to the city, straight to your kitchen, to allow everyone to sustainably grow quality food as close to consumption as possible, without any intermediaries.
Thanks to this unique model of decentralised agriculture, our solution reduces CO2 emissions by up to 85% compared to centralised production methods: we eliminate food transport, packaging and food waste.
Finally, we save up to 70% of the nutrients and 95% of the water usually used in conventional agriculture, by using an hydroponic system.
Caulys sprouts are available in the following EPFL campus restaurants:
- Ornithorynque, Novae
- Le Klee (RLC), Novae
- Le Puur, Compass
- Piano (ex Corbusier), Compass
- FoodLab Alpine, SV Group
- Esplanade, SV Group
