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.
A commercial business, Lufa Farms is advised by farmers, marketers, and university researchers. We built a second rooftop greenhouse in the Laval suburb of Montreal and got hundreds of local producers involved with the launch of our online farmers’ market, the Marketplace. The weekly baskets became fully customizable with the innovation of our own e-commerce platform and warehouse logistics software.
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Growing food locally on rooftops and sourcing from local farming families allowed us to swiftly adjust and respond to this demand. We saw what the future looks like and it’s all about local and sustainable,” says Mohamed Hage, Co-Founder and CEO of Lufa Farms. Lufa Farms launched their fourth commercial rooftop greenhouse in the borough of Saint-Laurent, Que. this week. We delivered over 20,000 baskets each week throughout Quebec while adding more electric vehicles to our fleet. We’re working with local nonprofits so that individuals and families in need can become Lufavores. Thanks to weekly Marketplace credits from our community pool and a 50% discount on us on all fruits and veg, hundreds of community members will get the chance to customize their own baskets and have access to fresh, local, responsible food.
Together, they're leading Lufa Farms to continued growth in and beyond Montreal through a shared belief that technology, efficiency, and sustainability can provide true solutions to global problems. This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. The statements made in this press release may contain certain forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties.
Timeline
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.
“We said, ‘Instead of learning how the food world works, let’s just come up with what we feel the food world should be,’” says Mohamed Hage, 39, who cofounded Lufa with Lauren Rathmell in 2009. Schedule your weekly basket from Monday to Friday, and skip it the odd week or pause for longer when you need to. There can be no assurance that any forward-looking statements or information will prove to be accurate as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements or information. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information. The Company does not intend to, and nor does not assume any obligation to update such forward-looking statements or information, other than as required by applicable law. We share events, industry news, and company updates on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.
The greenhouse measures 163,800 square feet—or the equivalent of three football fields—making it the world’s largest rooftop greenhouse. The company harvested their first rooftop vegetables and began delivering weekly baskets to their first cohort of clients, aptly named "Lufavores" (a contraction between 'Lufa' and 'locavore'). At that time, the company grew only 40 varieties of vegetables and delivered to about 200 customers without the option to customize the order.
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.
We developed a community of hundreds of neighbourhood pick-up points to get food from our rooftops and partners to Lufavores as directly as possible. Have your basket delivered to your neighbourhood pick-up point, or get it delivered to your home by electric car. Desert Mountain Energy Corp. is a publicly traded resource company primarily focused on exploration, development and production of helium, hydrogen and noble gases.
