Lux Foods is building year-round cherry tomato production in San Francisco for chefs, grocery buyers, distributors, and foodservice operators, and is looking for pilots and future supply relationships. The Y Combinator Fall 2026 company feeds sugars and nutrients through a growing medium so ultra-compact plants can develop under 90% lower light intensity than conventional cultivation, then regenerates fruit-dominant plantlets from small pieces of cultured tissue. Photosynthesis, the usual way plants make those sugars, converts about 1% of light energy into biomass. The plants come from Robert Jinkerson's lab at UC Riverside. With support from NASA and the Gates Foundation, the lab developed gene-edited tomatoes that put nearly all of their growth into fruit, with almost no stem or leaves, for food production on a spacecraft. Those tomatoes flew to the International Space Station in 2025. Jinkerson, a professor of chemical and environmental engineering and Lux's chief scientific officer, and CEO Andre Yeung have worked together since Yeung joined the lab in 2017. They are now building their first sugar-fed, low-light farm in San Francisco, and designing the simplified plants together with robotic handling so machines work a repeatable culture rather than searching through leaves for hidden fruit. Shorter routes from production to kitchen give Lux more room to choose varieties for flavor, nutrition, and ripeness rather than for how well fruit survives shipping. The pilot facility is already growing early tomato batches while the four-person team builds robotic tissue-handling workflows and records each production cycle. Tomatoes are the starting point. The aim is a wider set of whole foods, including heirloom, rare, and wild fruit, grown close to where it is sold and eaten.