Earlier in August, Clayton Mooney, co-founder and chief farmer of restaurant Clayton Farms Salads in Ames, opened his second location in San Francisco, part of a larger expansion plan for the startup that relies on hydroponic technology to grow its produce on site.
“We want to continue to scale nationally,” Mooney said. “In my mind, we want 1,000-plus locations.”
To start, he said he believes San Francisco can support three to four locations of the restaurant serving salads, wraps and smoothies.
“And then we’re looking at surrounding areas across California, whether it’s Sacramento, San Jose, San Diego, and then we’re really interested in expanding to Texas after California, and then we’re also looking at Florida and New York, and so … making a U shape and then working our way back across,” she said.
Mooney and his co-founder Danen Pool started the company that would become Clayton Farms Salads about eight years ago.
“We wanted to go direct-to-consumer, so we felt like if we could build decentralized indoor farms, we could grow food closer to people and shrink the supply chain down,” Mooney said. “And behind the scenes, the most important reason for that was the moment food is harvested, it’s dying, and by the third day post-harvest, it’s lost over half of its flavor and nutrition.”
When the Mooney and Pool first started the company, they were focused on the technology. That was the hydroponic growing equipment, which they wanted to make modular so they could assemble it and start growing food in many different types of spaces.
For the first few years, they had an at-home delivery subscription service, with a 30-mile radius from their farm at the Iowa State University Research Park.
“And while that took off for us, we realized at the end of 2022 that there is an opportunity with vacant restaurants,” Mooney said. “So a lot of restaurants didn’t bounce back post-pandemic because they had a lot of wasted dining space. We saw that as an opportunity, so we went and searched in Ames, found an old Fazoli’s Italian restaurant in North Ames. It still smelled like breadsticks the day we got the keys, and in about six weeks after getting the keys, we had converted the dine-in space to the farm.”
The founders realized having a restaurant – the one in Ames is 2,400 square feet – was a superior model for their technology; since opening in Ames, they’ve served a little over 350,000 people.
Hydroponic technology is designed for three food groups, Mooney said: leafy greens, such as lettuces, arugula, chard and kale; microgreens, such as broccoli sprouts, pea shoots and radish microgreens; and vine crops like cherry tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.
The startup has gone through the Startup Factory accelerator at ISU, as well Y Combinator, a San Francisco-based accelerator, which Mooney said helped the company connect to that area.
Clayton Farms has raised a little over $4 million since starting the business, with funding from angel investors, Ag Startup Engine and ISA Ventures, Mooney said. The startup also received non-dilutive state funding through the Iowa Economic Development Authority, he said.
Before opening a location in San Francisco, the company tried to expand in Iowa, he said.
After losing out on locations in Waukee and at the Iowa State campus, the team began to wonder, “Is Iowa ready for healthy fast food?”
“We started asking ourselves where could we go to give ourselves the most upside?” he said.
Mooney’s story as an entrepreneur and founder is one of “utter persistence and resilience, discipline and inspiration to the rest of us,” said his mentor, Kevin Kimle, the Rastetter chair of agricultural entrepreneurship at ISU.
With Mooney’s challenges locating another restaurant in the Des Moines area, he decided to get “crazy” and “go to San Francisco,” Kimle said.
The move demonstrated “both the persistence that you need, but sometimes the flexibility that you need when something isn’t working to flip the script and try something sometimes radically different,” Kimle said.
Mooney’s team noted that San Francisco is a walkable city with good weather, and from many perspectives “the healthiest city in the U.S.,” Mooney said.
When the San Francisco location opened on Aug. 10, online ordering crashed, Mooney said.
“So we know — roll with the punches there, but then by day two and day three and day four, we started to realize the community support is so strong,” he said.
Each location has its own team to manage all of the day-to-day operations, Mooney said.
Carlo Tioseco, who is a San Francisco resident and one of the regular customers of Clayton Farms, said he’s tried everything on the menu.
He aims to eat healthy to optimize his life and his health, he said.
“This is what I’ve been praying for,” he said. “This is the type of restaurant that I feel … we really needed, not just me and [my wife], but our city needed too.”