20 Years of Innovation: 2005-2025
Posted in Anniversary, Blog, Innovation on July 21, 2025
As we celebrate our company’s 20th anniversary, we had fun looking back at how we got to where we are now – the premier provider of green roof media in the US.
At rooflite, innovation has always been a hallmark of our day-to-day work life. In some ways, it had to be at the core of what we do because the very idea of green roofs was an innovation way back in 2005 when we started rooflite. Because of this, we’ve had to be creative and forward-thinking every step of the way.
Let’s talk about our green roof soil as a start. As you may know, green roof soil has to meet a lot of requirements, including weight limits, proper nutrients for plants, and water retention and drainage. In addition, green roof soil must meet the goals of an individual green roof project, and those design goals have spurred us to come up with many innovations.
When we started rooflite in 2005, most of the green roofs we provided soil for were extensive green roofs, with sedum or succulents. Most of these projects were retrofits on existing buildings to enhance building efficiency or stormwater management. The main soil requirement at that time was that the soil had to be very lightweight in order to work on existing building. But as the green roof industry grew, the types of projects that came our way changed.
More and more landscape architects and designers began looking for green roof soil solutions that would let them add different kinds of plants, like grass, shrubs, and perennials, to their green roof designs. As the green roof project requirements changed, our products had to change too. We had to keep the basics same – the soil had to be lightweight, support the plants, and drain and retain just the right amount of water – but we developed new soil products to meet the needs of the industry. These new products allowed designers to incorporate plants that needed deeper soil to grow.
As the industry continued to evolve, the designs got even deeper. In 2014, we had a group people approach us who wanted to put a rooftop farm in Brooklyn, with actual crops growing on the roof. We certainly didn’t have a product ready to do this, but we got to work to see if we could come up with an appropriate soil blend. After a lot of testing and fine-tuning, we created our rooflite agricultural product, which is a perfect combination of good farm soil and a modern green roof medium. That farm in Brooklyn eventually became the Brooklyn Grange Farm.
After that project, we saw a shift in the industry where new construction started to add green roofs as amenity spaces from the get-go. No more concerns about strict retrofit weight limits. These new buildings were baking in green roofs as a benefit for residents and people spending time at the building.
We started to get requests for green roof soil that would let designers add trees and much deeper plants to a green roof. Once again, we got to work to come up with some way to allow these designs to flourish. And our rooflite intensive base product was born. This product is an underlying layer that mimics and improves upon natural soil horizons while also being lightweight and free draining. Offering this product has allowed design professionals to install to greater depths with more freedom and flexibility in plant palette.
We also came up with a planter-specific soil system that would let designers add big planter installations onto green roofs. It’s a three-part soil system that is optimized for the planter environment. Because there is limited root space, our system has minimal volume loss and compaction. It’s made up of our rooflite intensive, intensive base, and drain products. Since we created our Planter Soil System, it’s been our most popular system, as more and more green roofs incorporate planters into the design.
Just as we’ve evolved our soil products to meet the needs of the growing green roof industry, we’ve also had to enhance our company operations to meet the demand for our green roof soil products.
Even in the early days of our company, we knew that we wanted to get our rooflite green roof soil to as many projects as we could to help designers achieve their vision. We knew the soil worked, and we knew people would have success. So how did we do it? We developed a nationwide blender network. We found top-notch soil facilities at strategic locations throughout the country that could handle blending our green roof soil mixes and delivering them to regional projects.
That wasn’t all we did, though. Our regional blenders offer all our rooflite soil products, which are sourced, produced and shipped within their region. That means that for each blender in our network, we also had to create blends for each of our products that work for the specific region the blender covers. The specific blends in each region are based on cost-effective raw materials and regional climate conditions. They help us cost-effectively meet the demands of green roofs in every corner of the country. It’s a win-win for us and for our customers, who can rely on our high-quality green roof in any region of the country.
Through all these innovations, we’ve always held one idea at the forefront: we want to give our customers the soil solutions they need to go as big and bold as they want with their green roof designs. That’s why we will never stop pushing ourselves to get better every year. We can’t wait to see what the next 20 years will bring!
