Our Story
Shannon O’Malley and Bradley Doyle started Brick Street Farms in 2016 out of their passion for sustainability and energy conservation.
As many great companies do, this husband and wife team started BSF by turning their home garage into a hydroponic grow room.
With Shannon’s background in electrical engineering and Bradley’s background in software architecture, both working for Duke Energy at the time, they turned a garage “grow-room” into a highly efficient technology based, energy efficient grow operation and started feeding their neighbors.
In late-2016 Shannon and Brad purchased an old rundown garbage dump in the Warehouse Arts District in downtown St. Petersburg. The property had been neglected for over 40 years, lacked basic utilities and had no infrastructure.
After 6 months of environmental clean up and adding basic services, Brick Street Farms started with 3 container farms and a dream.
The original BSF location grew to 5 containers by servicing the local hospitality industry and opening a “pop-up” style retail market for only a few hours on the weekends.By early-2019 BSF attracted a couple of investors and planned for a large scale expansion on the site.
After breaking ground on a much anticipated expansion in February 2020, the world shut down. BSF had to quickly pivot to continue operations and began to service large scale grocery, forming a partnership with Publix.
In late-2022, BSF finally completed its flagship, full-scale Hub. As the world began to open up again, BSF slowly transitioned back to servicing the hospitality industry and introduced direct-to-consumer with our onsite Retail Market and online shopping experiences.
Servicing our whole community is core to the mission of BSF, we do this through selling to hospitality, grocery and directly to our community via our Farm Store. Shannon always believed that everyone deserves access to fresh, nutritious food and started Desert Farms Foundation 501(c)3 to provide fresh produce to our local food deserts through strategic partnerships. Our monthly Farm Members directly support Desert Farms Foundation through their contributions.
The BSF Hub was intentionally and meticulously designed for large scale production in the urban core, we look to replicate the St. Petersburg Hub model in other cities. BSF does not ship or distribute long distances and to this end we’ve designed a model to be scaled and replicated in any city. Brick Street Farms is the future of farming.
2025 Update
Brick Street Farms has been on quite the journey since our inception in 2016. Beginning in 2024, BSF started to look for expansion opportunities, new investment partners and group or individuals to take the dream to the next level.
The entire indoor agriculture industry and specifically the CEA (Controlled Environment Agriculture) industry has been experiencing a massive evolution, with downsizing, mergers and a significant number of large indoor agriculture players have recently closed their doors or consolidated operations.
As a result of our search, BSF has been acquired by a new 3rd party with a detailed announcement coming soon. The original Founders, Shannon O’Malley and Bradley Doyle remain a part of the company foundation. However, our roles with company are changing. Bradley Doyle will remain in involved with BSF in a consulting capacity to ensure the new ownership has access to the legacy knowledge. Shannon O’Malley the company's original CEO, will be transitioning to Chief Operating Officer.
As the new ownership team takes the lead, further details and specifics will be released.