Our North Star

It’s the summer solstice today, the longest day of the year and one of the most meaningful in agriculture. We’re taking it as a time to share our thoughts with you, to look at how far we’ve come in the last ten years and share the north star guiding us ahead.

We built that greenhouse above, our first and the world’s first commercial rooftop greenhouse, back in 2011, with the vision of creating a sustainable local food system. Since then, we’ve grown a lot but we have never lost sight of this.

It’s been seriously tough. When we started out, neither of us had ever grown a tomato or sold a tomato. We gradually gathered an incredible team and solved every problem at the source as we met it. We’ve lost entire crops to whiteflies, we’ve struggled to crack the code of building rooftop greenhouses and each new site has required a monumental team effort, and, most recently, we’ve all (everyone everywhere, really, our team included) have been through the tumult of the year of all years that challenged our psyches at every level.

It’s also been incredible. We’ve now built four total rooftop greenhouses, each bigger and better than the last, we’ve allied with local producers all throughout the province, and we’ve grown an unstoppable team along with an unbelievable community of Lufavores. We’ve built the foundation for our local food system, rooted in sustainability, responsibility, and a drive to have a global impact.

And we are truly only just starting. Ever since we started this company, we’ve always taken the long view. This is a long game, to grow a company and a team that will play a large and lasting part in sustainability and be a beacon for transparent, meaningful entrepreneurship at every level.

Now, for our North Star. This is our uniting end game, what we wake up every morning for, the plans we have set out for the future. More concretely, over the coming years, we're out to accomplish the following… 

Keep improving our local food ecosystem by integrating all of the complex activities within it into one building. This will be our anchor especially as we grow beyond Montreal. We’re conceptualizing a place to house a farm, a warehouse, a kitchen-cafeteria, a community space, a EV charging lot, and more.

Develop an innovation centre. This will allow us to solve for construction improvements, greenhouse science, warehouse innovation, and sustainability analyses.

Electrify our fleet, eliminate single-use plastics, and reduce waste on the whole. We’ve already gone compostable in our greenhouses, meaning everything from bags to clips and twine is being sorted and composted with each crop change. Another big step towards this is our big standardized totes project that’s underway, with our partners collaborating on using our own totes in place of cardboard to send and receive products. This project will eliminate all our daily cardboard waste!

Create a circular economy rooted in the principles of sustainability and equality. From team-building to responsible agriculture to sustainable sourcing to carbon footprint, and from farm to Lufavore and back again. Think sending our plant waste to our partner farms, creating standardized reusable packaging for everything to nix all bags and boxes and bottles, and getting Lufavores ever more involved in our day-to-day mission.

And then on to the next frontier. Our goal is to get to work replicating our model in major cities around the world. This is the ultimate of objectives. One that scares and excites us the most. We want to make sure we are ready and mature enough, and we think we are almost there! 

These are pretty crazy ambitious goals, but we have the best team in the world, the best of missions, and the very best Lufavores.

Onwards, towards our north star ahead.

-Mo & Lauren and the rest of the Lufa Farms team

The Lufa Farms founding team back in 2017: Yayha, Kurt, and Lauren and Mo. We will miss and remember you always, Kurt.