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They’re planning on a yet to be determined second site in the northeastern pocket of North America, ideally this year. “Our vision is to grow food closer to where people live, and grow it more sustainably,” Rathmell says. Inside VSL (a reference to Ville St-Laurent, the district in which the farm is located); it’s the company’s newest greenhouse, and it sits atop a former Sears warehouse. As for the ubiquitous tote, Bélanger explained that it arose out of necessity. Before Lufa Farms offered delivery, the only options were pickup points, where labelled boxes awaited their Lufavores.
The greenhouse now yields 25,000 lb of produce each week, allowing Lufa Farms to serve more and more Quebec families year-round. In the spring we finished construction on our largest greenhouse to date in the Ville Saint Laurent borough of Montreal. This 163,800 square foot greenhouse is our most efficient in terms of energy and water consumption. It reached full production in August, doubling our production capacity going from feeding 1% to 2% of Montreal families. The company outgrew their Ahuntsic location, and moved their main offices and distribution centre to Ville Saint-Laurent where they began construction on their fourth, and largest rooftop greenhouse.
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With three rooftop greenhouses in the Montreal area, the company currently has 138,000 square feet of growing space where dozens of types of vegetables are grown. The company currently delivers around 20,000 baskets every week to over 500 pick-up points across Quebec, and in 2020, upon completion of their fourth greenhouse, the 164,000-square-foot space will enable them to feed up to 2% of Montreal households. This also means developing the expertise and technology to make this type of agriculture efficient, data-driven, and scalable. In doing so, they’re trying to demonstrate that large urban and peri-urban rooftop farms are a commercially viable way to feed cities.
With a natural talent for creating connections with experts in various fields, Mo has worked to build Lufa Farms from the ground up and actively oversees the day-to-day operations of the distribution centre, logistics, and expansion projects. He’s out to innovate and automate by leading the charge to build a self-sufficient and highly scalable local food engine, with custom software and logistics tools for everything from auto-ordering and inventory management to basket assembly and customer service. We've partnered with local businesses throughout Quebec, from community centres to coffee shops, to create a network of over 350 pick-up points so that Lufavores can get their baskets of fresh, local, responsible food delivered just steps from their door. “In March 2020, we saw a doubling of demand from existing and new Lufavores who couldn’t have been more supportive and understanding. It wasn’t easy, but our team worked incredibly hard and rose up to this challenge.
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This is your go to start customizing your basket with rooftop-grown, picked-to-order veggies and thousands of products from our hundreds of partners, like eggs, dairy, pasta, bread, meats, vegan alternatives, and more. You’ve got three full days to do so, until midnight the eve of your delivery day. And, everything on our Marketplace is fresh, local, and responsibly produced. With a biochemistry degree from McGill University, Lauren serves as Greenhouse Director, where she oversees all farming and plant science activities for the company's rooftop greenhouses. She took on the challenge of developing Lufa Farms’ sustainable farming practices, growing food commercially in a polyculture setting using no synthetic pesticides. She’s also responsible for the Communications Department and safekeeping of the Lufa Farms vision, mission, and voice.
The company, founded in 2009, has installed commercial greenhouses on the rooftops of several large industrial buildings in the greater Montreal area. Right now, around 20% of the vegetables sold each season are produced directly in the company's rooftop greenhouses, leaving lots of room for growth. "We're always looking for more greenhouses to build within Montreal," Bélanger confirmed.
Vegetables
The staff analyzed the pandemic’s trajectory and how they had to adapt at each step; reconfigured their warehouse floor to station workers further apart; then relaunched at the capacity they could handle, gradually scaling each week until they hit their usual stride. Lufa now has a team of eight programmers working on software and systems that manage e-commerce, warehouse management, routing, customer relationships, supplier fulfillment, pick-and-pack, vendor payments, delivery ETAs, and more. We went through a growth spurt reaching over 10,000 Lufavores and our team nearly doubled in size to keep up.
We want to reconnect people with where their food comes from by growing veggies right here in the city on rooftops, partnering up with hundreds of farmers and food makers, and providing it all to you through our online farmer’s market. The world’s biggest commercial rooftop greenhouse sits atop a former Sears warehouse in a semi-industrial northwestern quarter of Montreal. Early every morning, staff pick fresh vegetables, then bring them downstairs, where they get packed into heavy-duty plastic totes along with the rest of the day’s grocery orders. Lufa Farms says this latest rooftop greenhouse doubles its fresh vegetable production capacity, for a total 300,000 sqft. They began harvesting 10 varieties of tomatoes and three varieties of eggplants on June 26, reaching full production on August 11th.
Lufa Farms
The Company is primarily looking for elements deemed critical to the renewable energy and high technology industries. Agritecture is an advisory services and technology firm focused on climate-smart agriculture, particularly urban and controlled environment agriculture. "What's a little crazy," he recalls, is that none of the founders "had grown a tomato in their life" before opening the business. It is currently working on the electrification of its fleet of delivery trucks and is in the process of exporting its model "to different cities around the world," starting with Canada and the United States, Sorret said. Lufa "more than doubled" its sales during the new coronavirus pandemic, a jump attributable "to contactless delivery from our online site," says Sorret. Fully automated, the new greenhouse also has a water system that collects and reuses rainwater, resulting in savings of "up to 90 percent" compared to a traditional farm.
The baskets were delivered steps from customers doors thanks to a network of neighbourhood pick-up points . Altogether, we’re building a healthier, more sustainable local food system. We seek out partners who share our values of transparency and sustainability and work closely with them for our online farmer’s market, the Marketplace, to offer locals a full selection of products.
Since then, competitors picked up and ran with the novel idea, including American Gotham Greens, which constructed eight greenhouses on roofs in New York, Chicago and Denver, and French Urban Nature, which is planning one in Paris in 2022. Winter Farm raises $46M to build vertical farm dedicated to strawberry production. “Our objective at Lufa is to get to the point where we’re feeding everyone in the city,” Hage says. “We see ourselves as a technology company, in the sense that we solve with software,” Rathmell, 32, says. To fulfill that dream they had back in 2009—years before COVID-19 forced most grocery stores to enable online shopping—they had to do it themselves.
Lufa Farms, the brainchild of entrepreneur Mohamed Hage, delivers approximately 30,000 baskets of fresh produce per week and other locally-sourced groceries to families across the Island of Montreal. It’s essential for people to know their farmer, know their food, know where it’s from and how it’s grown. A local Montreal supermarket has also offered since 2017 an assortment of vegetables grown on its roof, which was "greened" in order to cutgreenhouse gas emissionslinked toclimate change. "The company's mission is to grow food where people live and in a sustainable way," spokesman Thibault Sorret told AFP, as he showed off its first harvest of giant eggplants. It's not an obvious choice of location to cultivate organic vegetables—in the heart of Canada's second-largest city—but Lufa Farms on Wednesday inaugurates the facility that spans 160,000 square feet , or about the size of three football fields.
On the ground floor of the new greenhouse, a huge distribution center brings together nearly 2,000 grocery products for offer to "Lufavores," including restaurants. At Lufa, about 100 varieties of vegetables and herbs are grown year-round in hydroponic containers lined with coconut coir and fed liquid nutrients, including lettuce, cucumbers, zucchini, bok choy, celery and sprouts. “You know, every time we talk to someone about it, we feel like it’s the ’80s, and we’re holding a big solar panel trying to convince the room that this is the future,” Hage says.
