Berry challenge exposes deeper flaws in Canadian food system

One of these “light recipes,” the scientists monitoring the strawberries hope, will be the key to unlocking a prize: a way to grow fresh berries in Canada year-round.

Growing them isn’t the hard part. These lab-grown strawberries are already perfect specimens, as red-ripe and juicy as if they came out of a sunny field in July. The challenge is to grow them at a scale and for a price that can compete with the imported berries that flood into Canada for the majority of the year.

Canadian diets are heavily dependent on fruits and vegetables grown in other countries. We imported almost $6.2 billion more fresh and frozen fruit in 2022 than we exported, an all-time-high trade deficit that allowed us to eat kiwis and blueberries in the depths of February. But a pandemic, wars and the steadily thumping drumbeat of climate change have all exposed the fragility of this system, contributing to eye-popping grocery prices and foods even occasionally disappearing from the produce aisle.

“There’s certainly nothing wrong with global trade. But you’ve got to have some sort of resiliency when things hit the fan,” says Thomas Graham, Kensana Research Chair in Controlled Environment Systems at the University of Guelph, one of the lead scientists monitoring the magenta-lit strawberries.

He and others are focused on a potential solution: “The only way you can produce plant food in Canada year-round is indoors.”

Graham’s team and 10 others are part of the Homegrown Innovation Challenge, an XPRIZE-style competition trying to jump-start this new grocery-store reality by offering millions of dollars in prize money to teams finding ways to grow berries out of season and at scale in Canada.

The challenge was mounted and funded by the Weston Family Foundation — yes, those Westons, the billionaire family that controls the grocery giant Loblaws and have become a lightning rod for consumer fury over food inflation and corporate profits. The foundation, a registered charity, is offering $33 million through several competition stages for berry-growing breakthroughs.

But berries are just the beginning: “It’s about the future of food in Canada,” the challenge claims.

If these ambitions are realized, more Canadians may shift closer to the oft-preached, rarely practiced “local diet.” But in this vision of the future, farmers’ fields are replaced by vast, glowing warehouses, climate-controlled chambers and increasing levels of automation. For some critics, this outcome may solve some problems while exacerbating deeper flaws in the food system — some of which the Westons and their businesses are directly responsible for, the critics say.

As the food systems are fissured by climate change and more, everyone can agree on one thing.

“At the end of the day, we’ve all gotta eat,” says Graham.

Canadian winters are balmy compared to the harsh environments the plant-growing chambers in Guelph were originally built to simulate: outer space. Guelph scientists used them to prove you could grow perfectly healthy radishes in very low air pressure, useful information for farming on Mars.

The chambers turned out to be helpful for earthbound environments, too. The colourful “light recipes” Graham and his colleagues are experimenting with are intended to trick the plants into thinking they are experiencing different conditions from the sun. One of these may coax the plants to produce more berries per plant, or sprout longer flower stalks that make the berries easier to harvest with automation.

Other teams in the Weston challenge are experimenting with friendly microbes, or inflatable greenhouses that are easier to transport to the far North, where fresh produce is even scarcer and costlier. Most teams are growing strawberries, but a botanist-engineer duo at Toronto Metropolitan University is cultivating raspberries — a pivot from a cannabis project that stalled.

Lesley Campbell and Habiba Bougherara were growing hemp for a commercial weed company when the cannabis bubble burst. Because their system was already designed for tall plants, when they heard about the Weston prize they switched to raspberries, and are also trialing blackberries, currants and gooseberries. So far, their plants have been producing berries for eight months straight in their pocket-sized windowless lab, with no signs of stopping.

“We’re breaking all the rules about how agriculture might work. You don’t have to have a winter, and so all of a sudden, you don’t have to stop harvesting plants,” Campbell says.

Campbell says they can grow 350 per cent more per square foot in this lab than outdoors. The challenge, again, is growing the berries at a cost consumers will bear.

Outdoors, sunlight is free. Indoors, replacing it with energy-intensive lights is expensive. Multiple teams noted that energy costs in Ontario are currently a major barrier; the city of Cornwall has become a hub for vertical farm startups because of its access to cheap, clean hydroelectric power from Quebec. The “clean” part of the equation is critical, too: a greenhouse or vertical farm powered by fossil fuels is emitting more of the greenhouse gases that helped create this problem in the first place.

“If you choose the right power source today, then you are more sustainable. If you don’t, you are not more sustainable. That’s one thing that people need to know about indoor agriculture,” says Jon Lomow, the CEO of Fieldless, a Cornwall-based indoor farm and partner on a team led by Allyson MacLean at the University of Ottawa.

Done right, however, farming indoors has a critical advantage that grows ever-more attractive as climate change fuels increasingly destructive droughts, floods and fires.

“Every day is a good weather day indoors,” Graham says.

“Agriculture is built on relatively stable weather. Stable weather is built on a stable climate. So as things get to be more chaotic, as we keep monkeying with things and not doing enough to remedy it, we need something that helps build in that resiliency to our food supply,” Graham says.

Lara O’Donnell, executive director of the Weston Family Foundation, says climate change was part of what drove the charity to consider tackling this issue in the first place, punctuated by the crisis of COVID-19.

“Food availability is one of the biggest challenges of our lifetime, and certainly, I’d say that the pandemic really shone a light on that,” says O’Donnell.

But whereas the pandemic disrupted supply chains and labour markets temporarily, climate change’s impacts are more insidious. Some of the regions Canada relies on most heavily for imported fruits and vegetables, such as California and Arizona, are already incredibly water-stressed and vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

O’Donnell says staff researched the problem for 18 months and then brought the proposal to the foundation’s board, which gave it the green light. (That board primarily consists of Weston family members, including Galen G. Weston. The foundation was started in the 1960s by W. Garfield and Reta Weston, Galen’s grandparents, with a donation of shares from the family company. The challenge was a new venture for the charity, which typically funds programs on healthy ecosystems and aging.)

“There is so much to love about berries,” O’Donnell says. They’re nutritious. Sales margins on berries are “slightly higher” for growers and producers than for other fresh produce, O’Donnell says, which they thought would incentivize them. Up to 80 per cent of the berries we consume are imported. Berries also sit in an innovation “sweet spot”: some progress has already been made, but there’s still a lot more to figure out.

“Ultimately, I think the most important takeaway, I would say, is that actually focusing on berries is really just a means to an end,” O’Donnell says — a way to unlock new approaches to growing fruits and vegetables of all kinds. While the challenge didn’t set out exclusively to fund indoor agriculture projects, the team of independent experts that assessed the proposals ended up choosing teams all working in this area.

Indoor agriculture is already responsible for more of the produce aisle than most Canadians realize. The volume of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and other produce grown in Canadian hothouses has increased 35 per cent in a decade, according to data from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, much of it concentrated in the Leamington, Ontario area — a source of consternation for some residents now kept awake at night by the glowing lights of these vast indoor fields. Leamington’s mayor recently told the Windsor Star that despite a bylaw requiring growers to use curtains at night, the city would never be totally dark.

Mucci Farms operates some of those greenhouses, and is a partner on one of the two University of Guelph teams. Their greenhouses include what Mucci calls the biggest indoor strawberry farm in North America: 72 acres of strawberry plants suspended in long gutters above the ground inside what feels like a very bright warehouse. On a recent visit, a bumblebee buzzed by lazily as Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” played tinnily from the speaker system.

These indoor-grown strawberries are meant to fill a “flavour gap,” says Ajit Saxena, Mucci Farm’s communications manager. Berries harvested in Florida or California have to be picked early to account for transit. They ripen along the way and arrive red, but often bland. Mucci’s strawberries, which are harvested within 24 to 48 hours before being shipped to retailers, can ripen fully on the plant — maximizing sugars and flavour — but can’t compete with field-grown on cost: theirs are “premium product,” Saxena says, and priced similarly to organic.

Loblaws is Mucci’s most important strawberry buyer, says Saxena, a partnership that was critical to getting a new and tricky product off the ground: “Without that retail partnership, this probably wouldn’t be here.” (Mucci also supplies indoor-grown for Costco and other buyers; the challenge terms forbid the participation of any partner with an exclusive relationship with a retailer or distributor, because they didn’t want to preferentially favour Loblaws or any other grocer, O’Donnell says.)

For some food system scholars, this partnership emphasizes questions of why the Westons would have been interested in the berry challenge in the first place.

Loblaws is the biggest food and drug retailer in Canada in an already heavily concentrated industry. Across the food system, experts say, grocers already jostling for horizontal retail dominance are also increasingly vying for more vertical control of the food supply chain. In the U.S., for example, Walmart recently invested in a beef processing company, raising concerns among ranchers about throttling competition.

“It’s a sort of tried and true strategy: the more moments along the production to retail supply chain that a company owns, the more of those profits are internalized,” says Michael Classens, a professor at the University of Toronto School of Environment.

He adds, “if profit remains the fundamental motive of the food system, it’s not going to be able to accomplish universal food security and ecological sustainability.”

Classens also says not to overlook the “social licence” a project like this offers the Westons: Galen Weston in particular has become a popular punching bag as food inflation punishes Canadians while Loblaws profits soar.

O’Donnell says the foundation is “always trying to be understanding of these criticisms and think about what we can do to circumvent any intentional or perceived private gain in anything we’re doing.” She adds that the foundation is a registered charity, and “even private family foundations have to exist for public good,” or have their status revoked.

She also says while a lot of work was done on developing the challenge earlier, it was announced in 2022, as food inflation, and public anger, exploded: “definitely unfortunate timing from my point of view.”

Sarah Rotz, a professor at York University’s faculty of environmental and urban change, says that the slow withdrawal of government support over decades has allowed agriculture, and other spheres, to be captured by private rather than public interests.

“Policies and programming all get sort of pivoted and moved in the direction of market-based principles and in the interest of private actors,” she says.

O’Donnell says the foundation would welcome more government support: their research showed that underfunding meant philanthropy could help fill a gap.

“The funding that is needed to really address this problem goes well beyond what a single foundation or even several foundations can provide.”

Campbell, of the raspberry-growing team at TMU, hopes that the Weston challenge might help the government perk up.

“The Weston Family Foundation has invested this money because they see this as a problem at a federal level,” she says.

“They are solving the problem with or without the government.”