Home Posts tagged Holyoke Massachusetts

Holyoke Continues to Ride a Green Wave

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Hagop Toghramadjian stands outside phase one of the Residences on Appleton, which features 88 units of mixed-income housing.
Community Spotlight Special Coverage

Community Spotlight

Hagop Toghramadjian stands outside phase one of the Residences on Appleton, which features 88 units of mixed-income housing.

Hagop Toghramadjian stands outside phase one of the Residences on Appleton, which features 88 units of mixed-income housing.

Aaron Vega calls them ‘meet and greets.’

And they are, well … just what that name suggests. They’re meetings between city officials and small-business owners, many of them representing ventures in the emerging ‘climate tech’ sector who have heard about Holyoke and the companies that now call it home, and want to hear more with an eye toward following them.

“They’re hearing about Clean Crop, they’re hearing about Sublime Systems, they’re hearing about Simple Pack, and they want to know what’s going on,” said Vega, director of the city’s Office of Planning and Economic Development, referring to three cutting-edge businesses we’ll get to back to later that are either already in Holyoke or advancing plans to locate there.

As city leaders listen to these business owners, a common thread — and a real challenge for the community — emerges.

“The biggest challenge for these companies that want to come to Holyoke as they move from their startup space is that there’s no built, ready space for them,” Vega noted. “There’s no white-box office space to move into. These guys don’t want to get involved in a rehab project; they want to be able to move in and get to work.”

“The biggest challenge for these companies that want to come to Holyoke as they move from their startup space is that there’s no built, ready space for them. There’s no white-box office space to move into. These guys don’t want to get involved in a rehab project; they want to be able to move in and get to work.”

Holyoke’s meet and greets and other aspects of its efforts to bring more small businesses to this former manufacturing hub — and early-stage efforts to create more spaces for them to move into — are just a few of the many converging storylines in Holyoke.

Others include:

• New housing projects, including a WinnDevelopment initiative at the former Farr Alpaca Co. complex — a $60 million endeavor that will create 88 units of mixed-income housing for adults 55 and over in phase 1 and another 70 in phase 2, while preserving a huge piece of the city’s past — and another project at Open Square that will create 80 units of market-rate housing;

• A cannabis cluster in flux: Holyoke welcomed the cannabis industry with open arms, and for a time, it looked like a large cluster of different businesses, from growers to dispensaries, would settle there. Some have, but as the sector faces growing pains and overall contraction, the city faces challenges, including businesses that are fighting to survive and one large grow facility, Trulieve, that has closed, with its huge plant sitting idle;

• New businesses and greater energy downtown. The city continues to ride a wave of entrepreneurship that has generated several new restaurants and storefronts in and around High Street, Vega said, adding that the new housing units coming online should generate more new-business activity;

• Those aforementioned companies in the green-energy and climate-tech sectors, headlined by Sublime Systems, which will manufacture environmentally friendly concrete at a plant on Water Street;

• A sports complex that is still in its early stages, with a site identified on Whiting Farms Road and other properties being assembled, as well as new ownership of Wyckoff Country Club (see related story on page 31).

• A reinvigorated Holyoke Community College, which has received a huge boost from MassEducate, the state’s free community-college program, and is making adjustments in the wake of a 24% rise in enrollment over the past two years;

• A new strategic plan for the city now being prepared, which is expected to help create a road map for continued progress in a city that has seen momentum on several fronts in recent years; and

• Existing businesses and traditions, especially the upcoming Holyoke St. Patrick’s Day Parade and Road Race.

Slicing through all that, Mayor Joshua Garcia, the Holyoke native now in his fourth year in the corner office, said the city is achieving progress with many goals and on several fronts, but there is still considerable work to do and projects to bring to the goal line.

These include everything from the sports complex to renovation of the historic Victory Theatre, a project now 40 years in the making. Those behind the effort are still struggling to close a significant gap between the funding that’s been raised and what will be needed to revitalize the landmark.

Mayor Joshua Garcia, left, and Aaron Vega

Mayor Joshua Garcia, left, and Aaron Vega say Holyoke continues to pursue — and add — new businesses in the broad realm of climate tech.

Garcia described economic development in the city as an ecosystem, one including manufacturing, small — and often very small — businesses, hospitality, the arts, food, and sports.

“The question is, how can we get all the boats to rise together so we’re establishing sustainability in our city?” he asked, adding that the answer to that question is the ongoing priority of his administration.

 

Not Your Run-of-the-mill Project

“Daunting.”

That’s the word Hagop Toghramadjian, a project director and development counsel with Boston-based WinnDevelopment, settled on as he was asked to describe the ongoing work at Appleton Street at the former Farr Alpaca complex.

Elaborating, he said he considers the project, called the Residences on Appleton, now far more than a decade in the making, to be the most challenging building-conversion initiative that WinnDevelopment has undertaken. And that’s saying something.

Indeed, the company has taken on many complex projects locally, including 31 Elm St. (Court Square) in Springfield and several buildings in the Ludlow Mills complex, and in numerous other communities as well.

But this conversion of the 125-year-old former mill complex into housing is on another level, said Toghramadjian as he talked with BusinessWest in the kitchen of one of the nearly finished units. He noted that there are several reasons why — from the extremely poor condition of the mill to the need to assemble property for parking and a three-story amenities building, to simply securing access to a building bordered on one side by a canal and the other by the Pioneer Valley Railroad.

As with all projects of this nature, there was also the challenge of pulling together the requisite pots of money, which, in this case, included everything from state and federal historic tax credits to state and federal low-income housing funds.

“We want to keep these small businesses local; we want to keep them here and give them an opportunity to grow their business.”

“Where we’re standing now … there was thin air, the floor had rotted through, the roof had rotted through — only the brick walls were still standing,” he said. “It was very dark, the air quality was bad … you would never dream that this could become comfortable, beautiful housing.”

But the various groups involved have persevered because this project is as important as it is difficult, he noted.

“Given its location and given how blighted it was, it cast a shadow on the whole downtown — it was a top priority for the city,” said Toghramadjian, noting that the site sits between Main and High streets, the city’s two main commercial districts, and directly across from Holyoke Heritage State Park and the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center. “Because of that, they’ve been really good partners, and that’s why Winn came to Holyoke and made this investment here — it’s because the city knew what it took to make this kind of project happen.”

Jim Lavelle

Jim Lavelle

“We’ve been trying to promote not only the lower utility rates here, but the clean energy that customers can promote with their products and hopefully help with sales.”

As phase 1 continues, with leasing to commence and tenants due to start moving in this fall, Toghramadjian and others we talked with said that, while these 88 units will make a welcome addition to the landscape and help spur economic development in the area, they represent a drop in the bucket when it comes to the city’s overall housing needs.

Indeed, Garcia said a recent report put that need at roughly 1,600 units of new housing over the next 20 years across the broad spectrum of income levels, which is another key element in the equation because different types of housing, including market-rate and homeownership, enables residents to stay in the city as their financial situation improves.

“The Appleton Street project doesn’t address the magnitude of the problem, but we’re chipping away at it,” said the mayor, noting that there may be as many as 600 units already in the pipeline.

That includes phase 2 of the Appleton Street initiative, he said, noting that WinnDevelopment is currently assembling the required pots of money for that initiative, as well as the market-rate units planned for Open Square and other ongoing housing initiatives.

There are several smaller housing initiatives taking place, said Vega, including many involving the upper floors of properties along High Street, projects that provide a few or a few dozen units, all of which help meet growing need.

The problem, he went on, is the immense competition for limited state and federal support for such initiatives, with seemingly every community in the Commonwealth in need of housing.

“All the developers are going for the same pots of money, whether they’re in Holyoke, Springfield, Chicopee, or West Springfield,” he said, adding that, in this environment, having a solid mix of projects, large and small, in the pipeline is a must.

 

Current Events

As noted earlier, there are several projects in various stages of development in Hoyoke, and many converging storylines.

One of the most intriguing involves new-business development, especially in green energy and related sectors, where a cluster is emerging as companies eye Holyoke for location, available and relatively inexpensive real estate, and, especially, its lower-cost, clean electricity, said Jim Lavelle, general manager of Holyoke Gas & Electric (HG&E), which provides that energy.

“We’ve been trying to promote not only the lower utility rates here, but the clean energy that customers can promote with their products and hopefully help with sales,” said Lavelle, adding that Sublime Systems is just one of many businesses, large and small, that have chosen Holyoke for that reason, among others.

As an example, he cited Simple Pack, a company now located in Open Square that manufactures green food packaging to restaurants, schools, hospital cafeterias, and food distributors. Being able to say such products are produced with clean energy, in this case hydropower, is important to the company’s mission and a strong selling point with its clients, he said.

There are several similar examples, said Lavelle, who will gain a different title in a few days — grand marshal of Holyoke’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

While his father served in that role decades ago, Lavelle never expected to wear that hat himself because, while he’s long been somewhat involved in the parade, he has never served on its committee.

He considers the honor a nod to HG&E’s important role in the city, and is enthusiastic about fulfilling the many duties of grand marshal, including attendance at myriad events and, in accordance with tradition, responsibility for parade-day weather.

“I have a much greater appreciation for the effort that goes into all these different events that the parade committee puts on,” he said. “And I have a much greater appreciation for how strong a regional collaboration exists between the different communities’ parade committees and other civic organizations and the sponsors; they really work hand-in-hand on all these different events that happen across Western Mass.”

Putting his HG&E hat back on, figuratively if not literally, Lavelle said Sublime Systems, which he believes should be ready to starting building its facility later this year or early next, will soon become the utility’s largest customer, with 10 to 12 megawatts of demand. That’s a huge draw, but one it can easily absorb thanks to transmission-system upgrades, he went on, adding that the HG&E has the capacity to attract several more large users and dozens of smaller ones.

Attracting these businesses is one of many priorities for the city, said Vega, noting that there have been a steady volume of meet-and-greets in recent years, and more are on the schedule.

Many of these sessions involve early-stage companies, many of them in green-energy or green-manufacturing ventures, he said, adding that, in addition to city officials, the leaders of companies like Clean Crop, which uses electricity to revolutionize food safety, are often in the room to discuss Holyoke and its many selling points.

“If they’re a little further along and they have specific questions, we’ll bring in Holyoke Gas & Electric to talk about the energy portfolio they can provide,” the mayor went on. “We’re on people’s radar — we just need to put the package together to bring them in.”

Holyoke at a Glance

Year Incorporated: 1786
Population: 38,247
Area: 22.8 square miles
County: Hampden
Residential Tax Rate: $17.46
Commercial Tax Rate: $38.54
Median Household Income: $37,954
Median Family Income: $46,940
Type of Government: Mayor, City Council
Largest Employers: Holyoke Medical Center, Holyoke Community College, ISO New England Inc., PeoplesBank, Universal Plastics, Marox Corp.
* Latest information available

Which brings him back to that ongoing challenge of offering them spaces that are ready to move into. There aren’t many of them in the city, but he’s in discussions with some building owners about possibly partnering with the city to develop co-work, start-up, or innovation space.

“That’s a direction we want to go in,” he told BusinessWest. “We want to keep these small businesses local; we want to keep them here and give them an opportunity to grow their business.”

 

Bottom Line

As for businesses already growing in Holyoke, there are many in the cannabis sector, which, while it is experiencing strong growing pains, remains a force in Holyoke, Garcia said.

He noted that social consumption, or so-called cannabis cafés, constitutes the next frontier for this industry — the Cannabis Control Commission is taking up regulatory reforms on such facilities — and for some establishments in Holyoke, it could be a real lifeline in this time of growing challenge.

“In Holyoke, we want to be among the first communities to adapt and implement that opportunity for on-site consumption,” he said, likening these establishments to bars and restaurants in the sense of attracting people to the community. “If we can bring people into our city to spend money, that’s a plus.”

With cannabis, as with many of the other storylines unfolding in Holyoke, Garcia said he remains a “glass-full leader.”

That means he’s optimistic, but also realistic. It means he understands that, while much has been accomplished, there’s still much to do, and on many fronts.

It means he’s more bullish on his hometown than ever.

Clean Crop Technologies Is Changing the Greentech Landscape

By
Co-founder and CEO Dan White
Cover Story

Planting the Seeds

 

Co-founder and CEO Dan White

 

Dan White calls it “turning back the clock on decomposition of food and seeds.”

That’s how he chose to describe the technology created by Clean Crop Technologies, a Holyoke-based company that has become one of the foundations of that city’s emerging cleantech and greentech sector and one of the more intriguing regional entrepreneurial success stories in recent years.

Elaborating, White said there have long been technologies that will prevent the decomposition that results from molds, fungi, toxins, and pathogens that attack seeds and crops. But until recently — in fact, until the technology developed by the team at Clean Crop — there was little if anything to reverse that decomposition, or turn back the clock, as he put it, once those foods were in the supply chain.

Getting more specific, he said that, when it comes to seeds, which have increasingly become the company’s focus, Clean Crop has been able to address a long-standing tradeoff when it comes to addressing decontamination.

“You can choose between killing the contaminant, and in so doing harm the germination of the seed, or you can make sure you have vigorous seeds, but not be able to kill everything,” he explained. “What we focus on at Clean Crop is developing our Clean Current technology to solve the tradeoff; we’re targeting applications where we can achieve the same or better decontamination as things like hot water and chemical treatments, but without harming germination in the process.”

In simple terms, the company is using a high-voltage cold-plasma technology to revolutionize food safety, and it’s doing it in downtown Holyoke in space that was once a paper mill, helping that city build what could be called a cluster of cleantech businesses, while further diversifying the region’s business community and perhaps laying the tracks for more businesses of this type.

“What we focus on at Clean Crop is developing our Clean Current technology to solve the tradeoff; we’re targeting applications where we can achieve the same or better decontamination as things like hot water and chemical treatments, but without harming germination in the process.”

This is an inspiring story, with chapters that have played out in Pennsylvania, where White developed an affection for agriculture and a desire to make it a career; in sub-Saharan Africa, where he would meet eventual partner Dan Cavanaugh and develop a passion for solving a problem that until then lacked a solution; in Iowa, where the partners would meet and then collaborate with Kevin Keener on new technology and a company to refine it and put it to practical use; in the Boston venture-capital market, where $3 million would be secured to bring the concept to the next stage; at UMass Amherst (and its Institute of Applied Life Sciences); and in a small office in Northampton, where the partners built a core technical team and proof of concept.

And now, in Holyoke, where the company, recently named among TIME magazine’s Top Greentech Companies of 2024, landed amid a search for clean energy (Holyoke boasts hydropower), needed space, and a landlord sympathetic to the needs and challenges of startup ventures (read: a shorter-term lease). There, Clean Crop is now deep into the process of scaling up, building its team, telling its story — there have many visitors to the site for tours as well appearances by the principals on several agriculture-related podcasts — and writing the next chapters.

Putting the problem of contamination into perspective, White said the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that roughly 30% of crops are lost in farmers’ fields every year to a wide range of toxins, pathogens, molds, and pests, with this loss quantified at $220 billion. And while the monetary loss, not to mention the huge loss of food to the supply chain, gets plenty of attention, what doesn’t is the fact that this crop loss is also a huge driver of greenhouse-gas emissions.

“These same contaminants, both on farm and in the supply chain, result in a lot of food being wasted,” he explained. “And as food waste decomposes, it generates methane, which is more than 50 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.”

Thus, Clean Crop Technologies is addressing several problems at once, from increasing the amount of food eventually reaching the table to reducing those harmful greenhouse gases.

For this issue, BusinessWest takes an in-depth look at Clean Crop, a budding enterprise that provides both food for thought when it comes to technology and its ability to solve some of the world’s bigger problems and more food for the table.

 

A Growing Venture

White grew up in Gettysburg, Pa., a farming region heavily populated by apple orchards. In high school, he started working at a friend’s family orchard and “fell in love with agriculture.”

“I wound up working for them for a few years in high school and college, and ended up spending most of my career working overseas,” he said, adding that he lived in Beirut, Lebanon for some time trying to get a hydroponic industry up and running there.

But he spent most of his career in sub-Saharan Africa, helping U.S.-based companies that were developing promising technologies to enable farmers and supply-chain operators to build market share.

For example, he worked with a South Dakota-based company that developed a biostimulant that allowed farmers to grow the same amount of crops while using less fertilizer.

“As food waste decomposes, it generates methane, which is more than 50 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.”

“They were interested in their applications for corn, bean, and other crop producers in Africa, and had no idea how to get it to market,” White explained. “So I helped them develop a go-to-market plan and figure out the regulatory pathways, and now they’re commercially active in six different countries on the continent and doing quite well.”

It was during that time that he met Cavanaugh, who was working as a commercial manager for Cargill in East Africa, handling all its trading in corn and oil seed commodities.

“He really learned the post-harvest side of the business,” said White, adding that it was a venture that Cavanaugh set up that eventually laid the groundwork, pun intended, for Clean Crop.

“He was tasked with establishing a peanut mill in Mozambique, which today basically just exports all its peanuts as farmer stock to South Africa, with very little value,” he explained. “The original thesis was that, if you have a mill that would be able to do that primary processing for the peanuts in Mozambique, you could then extract more value from the export market, exporting them as grade-A processed peanuts rather than the raw farm stock.

“That ended up failing because of a wide range of things, including pathogens and toxins that are common not just to peanuts but a lot of other food categories as well,” White went on. “Once they’re in the supply chain, there’s very few tools to solve them.”

Fast-forwarding a little, White and Cavanaugh essentially went about creating such technology.

“There’s a lot of ways to prevent contamination by these pathogens; there’s a lot of ways to mitigate or exclude food that’s been contaminated from the supply,” White explained. “But there were very few tools that we were aware of that could actually turn back the clock on contamination that was safe and that would keep that food in the supply chain.”

This reality led them down a rabbit hole as he and Cavanaugh looked at many different technologies in this space that held promise, including UV light, and eventually met Keener, then a professor at Iowa State University.

“Our long-term vision is that we want our machines to be operating in every seed-processing facility globally as the first line of defense in crop loss.”

“We read a lot of his papers and actually built a prototype of the technology we’re using today from schematics he had put in one of his publications,” White recalled. “And it worked, or seemed to work, and that was good enough for us to go out and meet him and visit his lab, and we started Clean Crop with him in early 2019.”

Early-stage work was focused primarily on the peanut industry, he said, adding that, when the technology was validated, a machine was taken to a peanut sheller in Georgia that was interested in piloting it. That pilot went well, he said, adding that the peanut company essentially said to come back when the machine was a thousand times bigger.

The partners agreed, but knew the pathway to commercialization involved several smaller levels of scaling before getting to that point. In the meantime, starting in the spring of 2021, they started exploring several other markets — everything from other high-value nuts to shelf-life extension for ground beef, seafood, and dairy products, and, eventually seeds.

 

Seed Money

Explaining the technology in somewhat simple terms, White said Clean Crop combines food-grade gases and electricity to create cold plasma, thus inactivating a broad spectrum of contaminants from seed surfaces in a dry, automated, and residue-free process.

Seeds travel through a hopper in a class-7 clean room and onto a proprietary conveyance mechanism where they then get exposed to the Clean Current ionized gases and are decontaminated before moving on for further processing. At present, the technology can process 25 pounds of seed per hour.

The seeds are shipped to Holyoke, where they are processed, bagged aseptically, and shipped back to customers, who are charged a flat fee per pound. These customers come in two categories — growers, especially those in the greenhouse, micro-green, and sprouts markets that are concerned about molds, but also food-safety risks; and also seed companies, specializing mostly in high-value vegetables such as leafy greens, broccoli, spinach, cauliflower, radishes, and others.

“One of the most compelling reasons that we moved here, long-term, is the municipal hydro dam.”

The goals moving forward are to expand that customer base, scale up operations, grow market share, and eventually sell the machines to customers.

“Right now, we only have one machine operating, but we’re looking to significantly expand our capacity this year,” said White, adding that the company has a large backlog of work. “Our goal this year is to scale our operations to absorb as much of that demand as possible and get our machines out into the world to customer facilities.

“Our long-term vision is that we want our machines to be operating in every seed-processing facility globally as the first line of defense in crop loss,” he went on. “To get there … it’s a non-trivial challenge to develop not just the manufacturing side of a company, but the company success. To be able to support a remote set of machines is a challenge, one that we want to grow into once we figure out the supply chain.”

Elaborating, White said the company, which is still in what he calls phase 1 of its development, will bring a second machine online in the near future, greatly increasing its capacity for serving customers, and scaling from there, bringing several machines with much larger capacities online. The goal is to have machines in at least 50 seed processors around the world by 2030, giving Clean Crop perhaps 10% of the global market and $100 million in annual revenues.

Doing all that will take capital, he said, adding that the company is well-capitalized and is committed to staying, and growing, in Holyoke, with opportunities to expand in its current space and into other space nearby if the need arises, while taking advantage of the city’s abundant and comparatively inexpensive green energy.

“One of the most compelling reasons that we moved here, long-term, is the municipal hydro dam,” he explained. “We have some of the cheapest commercial electricity rates in the state, and as an electro-chemical solution, that’s one of the main variable costs we’re going to have as we scale, and we see that as an enormous asset.”

It’s an asset that could attract other companies in this emerging realm as well, he went on, citing the pending arrival of Sublime Systems, a producer of low-carbon cement, as another sign that Holyoke’s inexpensive power and other selling points are turning heads.

“We see this as a real opportunity, not just with us, but with a range of other companies coming out of the Greater Boston ecosystem that are really going to drive this next wave of industrial decarbonization,” White said. “There’s an opportunity for Holyoke to be a leading space for the next milestone of scale-up for those companies coming out of Greentown Labs and MIT. The city happens to have this tremendous advantage of having a carbon-free, economically competitive energy source as well as a lot of underutilized industrial space.”

Meanwhile, the company is working to ensure that it has sufficient talent to meet its future goals, partnering with Springfield Technical Community College on an initiative to create a pipeline of technicians for the years to come.

 

Bottom Line

Whether Holyoke does, indeed, attract other greentech companies, and whether Clean Crop reaches the lofty goals it has set for the coming years, remain to be seen.

But for now, the company is already making its mark when it comes to the global issue of seed health, and helping to put Holyoke on the map as a potential home for companies in this sector.

This is a company, and a story, that bears watching as the seeds it has already planted continue to bear many different kinds of fruit.