Brownstein: Fifth greenhouse will be its most efficient so far, Lufa Farms says

This greenhouse, set to begin sowing vine crops in March for harvesting in May, is Lufa Farms’ fifth. It may not be Lufa’s largest urban garden at 127,000 square feet. That accolade goes to the St-Laurent borough facility that, covering 164,000 square feet (the size of three football fields), is purported to be the world’s largest rooftop greenhouse. But according to Lufa Farms co-founder Yahya Badran, the Marché Central location, a steel structure with aluminum moldings and double-paned glass walls, will be its most efficient and technologically sound. More important in these wild inflationary times, its vegetable yield should lead to significant cost reduction.

“This is an Ultra-Clima greenhouse, which is far more advanced than a standard greenhouse,” says Badran, also Lufa’s construction director. “With its diffused glass walls and other temperature controls, it will yield approximately 18 to 20 per cent more produce than the standard models, which will bring prices down.”

With the addition of the Marché Central greenhouse as well as that at its one indoor garden farm, Lufa will have 550,000 square feet of vegetable-growing space. Like the other venues, this latest is also a pesticide-free, hydroponic greenhouse. The company employs about 600 workers at its farms and distribution centre and is expected to hire another 40 when the Marché Central greenhouse gets going in March.

Lufa now harvests 215,000 veggies a week from its current operating locations. It has met its initial goal in serving over two per cent of Montreal, sending out 30,000 baskets a week to its 62,500 subscribers.

But Lufa provides more than just veggies, including numerous varieties of tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces et al. It is also a giant online farmers market. The bottom floor of its St-Laurent borough warehouse serves as a distribution centre, wherein individual boxes of vegetables, fruits, breads, cheeses, meats and even wines, among other household products, are ordered by and prepared for Lufavores, Lufa’s individual and restaurant members.

Baskets are then shipped to 380 pick-up points around the city for customers. For an additional $6 charge, Lufa also provides home delivery, from Gatineau to Quebec City, to its Lufavores and, at present, 70 per cent of them are opting for this service.

Deliveries of vegetables can be received within hours of ordering, and unless you’re growing your own, you would be hard-pressed to find fresher or tastier anywhere in town, particularly in winter.

A lufa, incidentally, is a squash/cucumber-like vegetable indigenous to Lebanon, where Lufa co-founder Mohamed Hage was born. And while Lufa turns out just about every kind of veggie, it doesn’t yet produce a lufa.

The first Lufa greenhouse was launched on an Ahuntsic rooftop in 2011. With expansion, business grew steadily for the next decade and boomed during the major pandemic period three years ago, largely due to the reluctance of people to go to supermarkets.

However, as Lufa’s communications director, Yourianne Plante, points out, business, like the pandemic, plateaued in 2022 with people venturing out again to supermarkets. While basket deliveries remained stable and demand for its vegetables was still as strong as ever, inflation hit the company particularly hard on grocery goods — from corn starch to chicken to cheese — it didn’t harvest. As a consequence, the tab for orders that Lufa delivered was significantly reduced as consumers went to other sources for these non-veggie products.

But Lufa management remains optimistic about returning to its pre-pandemic levels of business.

“Our goal now, with the new greenhouse, is to be able to provide 10 per cent of all Quebec with our produce,” Plante says. “We are really positioning ourselves now as a viable online grocery with about 2,000 products on the market.

“Our belief is also that with the more greenhouses we can build, the more affordable our prices can be. For example, we are already seeing it with our lettuce at our indoor farm. We can produce up to 20,000 lettuces a day, and we’re now selling our lettuces for one dollar less than we were before.”

Plante notes that Lufa has other discount strategies in place to keep prices competitive with supermarkets. But the fact remains that consumers are being so hard hit everywhere with inflationary prices these days that many are turning away from staple goods no matter how organic.

“These have been really tough times for us, too,” Plante says. “We had been used to growing at between 20 to 30 per cent a year, but for almost the last two years, we are just breaking even due to inflation, increased competition and consumers cutting back. But we are still lucky to remain in business. And our goal now is to get back to 30 per cent and increase our subscriber base by lowering our prices.

“From Day 1, our mission has been to disrupt the industry, and with every greenhouse we build and with our 450 partners providing us with our 2,000 products, we are becoming more efficient and becoming more able to give back to our clients directly. We no longer want to be seen as a niche service, but as a service that can be affordable, accessible and competitive for all. We now feel we can provide not only the best in quality but in price as well.”

No surprise: Plante says a mammoth, 200,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art rooftop greenhouse, at a yet-undetermined city location, is already in the planning stages.