Contact
Book service
Follow us
Sign up for our newsletter to receive our latest news and innovation updates.
- By Darran Stone (Business Development Manager – Africa & Asia Pacific)
For over 30 years, Ellepot has helped nurseries grow better plants, faster, and more sustainably. Founded in Denmark in 1993, we began with a simple idea: to combine machines, paper, and trays into a system that improves propagation quality while reducing single-use plastic. Today, our technology is used in more than 130 countries to produce over 10 billion Ellepots each year.
Now we are taking the next step. Drawing on three decades of experience, we are moving from physical systems to digital ecosystems, bringing intelligence, connectivity, and insight to every stage of plant production. This is the vision behind Ellepot Grow Smart, our new digital platform that will help nurseries work smarter, not harder.
Across the nursery industry, many of the same challenges persist. Operational knowledge often lives in people’s heads, tracking is still done on paper, and many production decisions rely on experience rather than evidence. When skilled staff move on, valuable know-how leaves with them. Grow Smart will change that. By connecting data from machines, substrate mixing, and tray movement into a single platform, it will create a living digital memory, a permanent record of best practices tailored to each nursery. This means consistency and quality will no longer depend on who is on shift, but rather on structured data that captures how great results are achieved.
Our digital journey began with Ellepot Live, a connected system that provides real-time data from Ellepot machines. Operators and managers can monitor production speed, downtime, and maintenance requirements in real-time. It is more than a dashboard. Operators can make timely adjustments, maintenance teams receive automatic alerts, and managers can remotely oversee multiple machines. Ellepot Live turns every machine into a connected asset, laying the foundation that Grow Smart now builds upon, extending connectivity beyond the machine to the entire nursery.
First fase
The first phase of Grow Smart, launching in 2026, will focus on traceability and quality control. Each tray will receive a digital ID that links it to key production steps, from substrate mix to dispatch. Every adjustment, operator, and mix will be recorded and traceable, helping nurseries prevent issues rather than react to them. Alongside this, we are developing the Ellepot SmartMixer, which is currently in development and is expected to launch in Q2 2026. This sensor-equipped mixer will automatically record component ratios, EC, moisture, pH, and mix time for every batch, ensuring consistency across operators. Combined with RFID tray tracking, Grow Smart will provide nurseries with complete visibility of tray movement from propagation to planting, thereby reducing losses and simplifying logistics.
Together, these tools form the data backbone that will drive the next generation of nursery management.
Once reliable data is captured, it opens the door to prediction. Grow Smart will enable nurseries to forecast substrate, labour, and space requirements, track resource use, and improve efficiency. This is how we future-proof nurseries by laying the foundation for AI and automation before the revolution fully arrives. AI cannot function without structured, reliable data. What we are collecting now (every batch, every input, every reading) becomes the training data that will drive future automation. The key is that this will be your data, specific to your site and your production, not generalised information from somewhere else in the world. By collecting data today, Ellepot growers are building the foundation for self-learning, predictive systems for tomorrow that will allow them to spend less time reacting and more time improving – using their own data to anticipate issues before they occur
Over time, this will enable the prediction of growth rates, survival outcomes, and even optimal dispatch timing with impressive accuracy. These predictive insights will help growers plan proactively, reduce waste, and fine-tune production with precision. AI will not replace experience. It will enhance it by turning years of grower knowledge into a repeatable, data-driven process.
We are co-developing Grow Smart with our grower partners to ensure it fits real-world nursery conditions. This is not just a digital tool. It is a long-term partnership designed to help nurseries capture data today that will drive smarter decisions tomorrow. From paper to data and from systems to ecosystems, we are building the digital foundation to produce the perfect young plant and help nurseries around the world grow smarter, more efficiently, and more sustainably.
