Most lettuce sold in grocery stores along the East Coast comes from four greenhouses in Carbon County.
Little Leaf Farms has become the largest indoor producer of leafy greens in the world, using advanced greenhouse technologies and sustainable practices, according to its CEO.
The company grew to become a pioneer in the industry as it expanded operations in Pennsylvania.
Largest facility of its kind
Little Leaf Farms was founded in Massachusetts in 2015 and expanded to Pennsylvania in 2021. The company grows a variety of baby lettuce varieties in four ten-acre greenhouses just outside of McAdoo.
More than 600 people are employed at the facility in Banks Township, Carbon County, near the Schuylkill and Luzerne county borders.
Paul Sellew is the CEO and founder.
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“Greenhouses have been around a long time, and there are well-established greenhouse crops: tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, strawberries and even head lettuce,” he explained. “Baby leaf lettuce, what we grow, is new. It’s really new in the last ten years.”
Before Little Leaf lettuce was sold in stores, consumers in Pennsylvania and many other states in the eastern U. S. were purchasing lettuce from farther away, causing it lose freshness in transit.
“We are harvesting 7 days a week, packaging it and getting it in the store within 24 hours,” Sellew said. “So people in Pennsylvania and the eastern region of the United States can now truly enjoy fresh lettuce.”
Growth in Pennsylvania
“This place has been an amazingly busy and productive campus,” Sellew said of the compound in the McAdoo Industrial Park.
The Shapiro administration granted Little Leaf Farms $155,000 in 2025 from the nation’s Agricultural Innovation Grant Program.
Sellew said that funding has supported the company’s steady growth in Pennsylvania, building a 10-acre greenhouse every year for the last four years.
“We’re going to take a pause now. Forty acres is good,” he said. “We can build more here; we hope to do that in the future.”
The Pennsylvania facility ships its product to nearly 8,000 grocery stores along the East Coast.
“Historically, this has not been a lettuce-growing part of the world,” said Jed Sekaran, executive vice president of operations and construction.
“We have been able to grow something and build a business here that is very different from what used to be here,” he continued. “That’s translated into a lot of great technical farming roles in the area, and the entire East Coast is getting better, higher-quality lettuce than they ever were before.”
The company will expand to Tennessee in 2026 to provide more regions of the United States with fresh and sustainably grown greens.
The growing process
Greenhouse growing is a form of controlled environment agriculture that allows for more efficient, sustainable and profitable farming practices.
Tim de Kok makes sure the crop remains consistent as chief growing officer.
“A lot goes into it before it hits the shelf,” he said. “You resort to technology to be able to grow this product year-round in a location where outside field farming is very difficult.”
The greenhouses are designed with thousands of sensors that measure light, humidity and temperature levels. The team can monitor and adjust those levels both on site and remotely to create the ideal environment.
“We are managing the climate minute-to-minute all day long, we’re managing the amount of light we have in here with screens and supplemental light. We manage the temperature,” Sekaran said. “What that means is that every plant is growing to perfect potential.”
The plants are moved around the greenhouse by machines and are fed the exact amount of nutrients needed. This includes recycled rainwater, melted snow and sunlight.
Little Leaf Farms uses a hydroponic system, which means the plants are grown without soil.
“All the plants are sitting in plastic gutters or plastic channels. Those are slightly tilted,” Sekaran explained. “We drip the exact mix of nutrients that the plants want on one end, and because of the tilt the water goes through, the plants take up exactly what they need.”
The company’s “clean from the start” method means they don’t use chemical products or pesticides, and the product is never touched by human hands. For that reason, the lettuce doesn’t need to be washed, and it lasts longer.
“When the nutrients are always right, then you get a better shelf life,” de Kok said. “It's fast, it's local to the market, and that makes the difference.”
