A few years ago, as a food industry entrepreneur in Chicago, Gary Lazarski started to notice something that bothered him. “My office back in 2010 was in the Loop; there were a bunch of different lunch places around there, and every sandwich and every salad you bought would have these tomatoes on them,” Lazarski tells Fast Company. “They were terrible. You’d see people sitting on a park bench, and without fail, they all do the same thing: Open up the sandwich, look at that sad, orange disk, peel it off like it was a dirty sock, and throw it out.”

We all do it, Lazarski says; when a tomato is subpar, mealy-textured, and weak-colored, we don’t think of throwing it away as wasting food, but rather as salvaging an otherwise acceptable sandwich. But why, Lazarski wondered, could Chicago, a great food city, not equip its lunch options with tomatoes that actually tasted good?

Lazarski and his business partner Jim Murphy were, at the time, piloting a food-distribution company called Local Foods, which is still operational today. Through that enterprise, they connected with some Dutch business partners, Royal Pride Holland, and on trips to the Netherlands, visited their greenhouses. Royal Pride Holland has, since its founding in 1960, been a pioneer in greenhouse growing techniques; their many-acred structures use hydroponics and radiated heat to grow produce year-round. In one greenhouse, Lazarski and Murphy saw bright red, perfect tomatoes growing in the middle of winter. They began to wonder if a glass enclosure on the outskirts of Chicago could supply the city with the elusive, quality tomatoes that would not end up in the trash.

They pulled together around a dozen investors and $11 million to develop a greenhouse built with Royal Pride Holland’s glasshouse and hydroponic technology, where they would, once launched as MightyVine in August 2015, grow both cherry and large slicing tomatoes. In the Midwest, land-grown tomatoes enjoy just a brief season, from midsummer to early fall. The best tomatoes are those that are plucked at peak ripeness and delivered fresh, but the tomatoes populating grocery store shelves in Chicago through the winter have been plucked prematurely to survive a long trip cross-country from warmer climates. MightyVine, with Lazarski as CEO, can grow and ship ripe tomatoes year-round; the produce is grown without pesticides, and the tomatoes can linger on the vine until they’re ready to be plucked. Lazarski knew the operation would fill a void in the Midwestern produce scene, but they needed land to be able to pull it off.

Rochelle, Illinois, a small city 80 miles west of Chicago, was where Lazarski and Murphy landed. “It’s well suited to get us up into Wisconsin, into Iowa, and into the city itself,” Lazarski says. While it would have been appealing for marketing purposes to locate the greenhouse in Chicago proper, logistically speaking, it would’ve been a nightmare, Lazarski says; space constraints would make it difficult to scale, and visions of tomato trucks attempting to navigate the Dan Ryan Expressway during rush hour were enough to cement the founders’ decision to locate on the outskirts.

Rochelle was a city that was poised, in the years leading up to the recession of 2008, for great economic growth, as it sat at the intersection of a number of roads that fanned out into other Midwestern economic centers like Chicago and Milwaukee. When Lazarski put out an RFP to the state of Illinois, seeking a place to site a 15-acre tomato greenhouse, he learned about a parcel that had been bought up by CenterPoint Properties, which intended to build a network of warehouses on the site. They built one, then the recession hit, and they abandoned the plans and sold the property back to its original owner, a local farmer. “You hear a lot of talk about shovel-ready projects around the recession,” Lazarski says. “This was literally shovel ready–CenterPoint had already stripped the topsoil off and run roads, water, and electricity out to the site.”

Because it was already treated for development, the land could not be farmed. When Lazarski and Murphy approached the farmer who owned the property, and explained their idea–to build a greenhouse on top of the wasted land–he was immediately on board; the farmer is now an investor and board member for MightyVine.