All about building the world’s largest rooftop greenhouse.

By 2019, we were gearing up to do something big: build the world’s largest rooftop greenhouse.

Celebrating our tenth anniversary with a record-breaking rooftop greenhouse. At the end of the summer, we began construction on our fourth urban farm, located right above our new headquarters. Armed with the knowledge gained from our previous sites, the construction was streamlined and completed within just six months. 

Building our most energy. Thanks to our blackout thermal curtains (to prevent light pollution while insulating the greenhouse), double-paned glass, and rain and meltwater collection, this greenhouse has the best energy and water savings of all our sites. Plus, its huge surface area provides additional thermal insulation to the building below and, in turn, traps residual heat to warm up the crops.

Doubling our growing space by adding a whopping 163,800 square feet to our production capacity. The entire greenhouse is dedicated to vine crops - we’re talking cukes, tomatoes, eggplants…anything vertical. By August 2020, our team harvested the site’s first famous cherry tomatoes, and we were well on our way to being able to feed up to 2% of Montreal families with fresh, local, responsible veg year-round.

A team that’s always up for a challenge. With about three football fields worth of space, our Ville Saint-Laurent team definitely gets their steps in while doing their daily tasks. Despite our decade of experience, adapting to such a large space wasn’t easy and required a lot of planning and reorganization. Radu, our Greenhouse Operations Manager, explains that crop changes (aka removing and replanting 64 rows nearly 400 feet long) are especially challenging, but the team really comes together to get it done in just a couple weeks, and it’s super rewarding once the work is all over.

We’re incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made over the last decade and we’re eager to keep working on even bigger projects that’ll bring our vision of cities filled with rooftop greenhouses to life.