
For three decades, the British-born operator has worked behind the grocery shelf, turning perishable food into a repeatable system. At Gotham Greens, his old obsession with time, temperature and movement has found a greenhouse-sized stage.

He built a farm like a factory, betting that software, sensors and stubborn operational discipline could shorten the distance between a seed and a salad. The experiment scaled across America - and ended by exposing the brutal economics beneath agriculture's most controlled environment.

The roboticist who once taught machines to navigate offices is now giving them watering cans - and asking whether a greenhouse can compete with a field on price.
Hiroki Koga is the co-founder and CEO of Oishii, the New Jersey company that grows the Omakase Berry inside the world's largest indoor vertical strawberry farm. A Tokyo native who watched Japan's vertical-farming boom collapse a decade before he built his own, Koga bet on a fruit nobody else would touch - strawberries - because they were the hardest crop to grow at scale and the only one with the economics to matter. By recreating the climate of the Japanese Alps indoors and getting bees to pollinate at over 90% success, Oishii became the only player to produce pollinated fruit commercially, pesticide-free and year-round.