Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) pivots food production from an outdoor field setting to the indoors where growing conditions can be calibrated to fit crop needs. This research investigates vertical farms as a type of CEA. In particular, using the St. Louis area as a case study, it provides data-driven support for optimizing a vertical farm’s business model including its supply chain. The methodology presented here informs agri-preneurs about what crops to grow in a vertical farm, how much to grow given local market demand, and what vertical farm configuration (e.g., Dutch bucket, nutrient film technique, deep water culture) a facility should use. Based on the case study’s base scenario, the simulated vertical farm business would record an economic loss. However, the study did find several paths to improving profitability. First, reducing fixed and variable costs benefits profitability. Proper facility-level production and resource planning helps with managing the fixed costs. Second, increasing market prices may benefit profitability, but it has diminishing returns. As a result, firms can justify making investments that enhance their reputation and market competitiveness, though the advantage these marketing activities provide will decline as prices increase. Third, growing demand or increasing market share does not necessarily improve profitability.

Utility disruptions may stem from insufficient power generation, inferior infrastructure, or secondary weather perils (e.g., tornadoes, floods, snowstorms) that take energy infrastructure offline. The latter present a unique risk that not all existing power options can mitigate. Regardless of their origin, power disruptions have the potential to cripple food supply chains and undermine food system sustainability. To prepare for managing future disruptions, food and beverage manufacturers may couple electrical microgrid and thermal district heating infrastructure with small modular reactors (SMRs) or smaller microreactor systems to form low-carbon power islands. Although SMR technology is a somewhat new source of energy and has not yet achieved commercial viability, it provides the potential to make food and beverage manufacturing more resilient and sustainable when it becomes broadly available. To assess the potential cost–benefit of activating such technology as a sustainability-oriented resilience investment, we conducted a technoeconomic downtime threshold analysis. The case assumes that the technology is the full-time power source and the SMR yields stronger returns as facility downtime or downtime costs rise. The analysis found the breakeven point to range from 12.3 h down to 613.2 h down annually for a 5 MW system, depending on facility scale and assumed downtime costs. At a representative downtime opportunity cost of $10,000/h, SMR adoption requires approximately 61.3 h (5 MW) of annual outages to break even, highlighting scale effects on feasibility. Incorporating a 20% thermal energy credit reduces required outage thresholds by roughly 20%, lowering the breakeven level to 49.1 h. These results highlight the potential role of SMR-enabled power islanding in supporting sustainable food manufacturing through improved energy resilience, low-carbon power, and thermal energy recovery.