Haven Greens, Canada’s first fully-automated greenhouse, located in King City, ON, is continuing to expand its retail footprint.
Recently, it launched its latest product in Costco – a large format (10oz) of its Baby Green Leaf – delicate, crisp, and mild, perfect for sandwiches, wraps, or a fresh salad base.
Available in locations across Ontario, this launch marks Haven Greens’ second addition to its Costco lineup, which includes the brand’s 10oz Trillium Blend, a Costco-exclusive medley of baby green leaf, baby red butter leaf, arugula, and mustard greens named after Ontario’s official flower.
Beyond Costco, Haven Greens’ Baby Green Leaf is available in smaller 4oz and 8oz formats in stores across Ontario and Western Canada, including all Whole Foods, Metro, Sobeys, and Foodland stores in Ontario.
Through its touchless, climate-controlled, and pesticide-free facility, Haven Greens’ products are ready-to-eat without washing and have an extended shelf life of multiple weeks. Since its first harvest last March, Haven Greens has become the #1 indoor lettuce grower in Ontario, producing approximately two million pounds of lettuce for Canadians over the past 12 months within its five-acre facility located in King City, just outside of Toronto.
“We operate Canada’s first fully automated leafy green greenhouse. We operate a five-acre phase-one block, which is our only greenhouse at the moment. We’re currently in the process of trying to expand by another five acres, which would be on the same property here,” said Jay Willmot, CEO and Founder of Haven Greens.
“Currently we’re operating one five-acre block plus the associated support buildings. This is on my family’s farm—we’ve been here since 1967. It traditionally was a horse farm, so we’ve taken a chunk of that farm and converted it into high-tech greenhouse production.”
The greenhouse is just under two hectares, which is 18,700 square metres. That’s just the glass house component. Then there’s another 0.75 hectares of associated building.The glass house component is just over 200,000 square feet inside.
Willmot said the company grows leafy greens. In terms of its primary production, it grows multiple varieties of green leaf lettuce, red leaf lettuce, and flavour varieties. Currently its growing a medley of arugula and different mustards.
The Costco relationship was first launched in October.
“We’re going through our first full year of production right now. Last year was a scale-up year. For a while we said we’d produce in excess of 10,000 pounds per day. Right now it went quite a bit above that. In February and March we were up over 12,000 pounds a day. It is our goal to exceed over 4.1 million pounds into markets. The exact number is about 4.123 million pounds on an annual basis,” said Willmot.
A second facility will help with the scaling up of the business.
“We want to start constructing ideally this summer. If we do that, we would be launching in Q2 of next year. That would more than double our capacity,” added Willmot.
“We do export. We’re in food service in the United States, so we sell to restaurants. We are talking to different banners down there, but we haven’t gotten listed anywhere yet.
“We’re innovating in terms of our product pipeline as well. We’re just about to launch a line of ready-to-eat salad kits. A really big benefit of what we do here is we grow everything pesticide-, herbicide-, and fungicide-free, so there’s no need to wash our product. It’s ready to eat right out of the tray.
“We’re launching a line of salad kits that allow the consumer to mix their sachet, dressings, and toppings right in the tray. You can shake it up, take it to your desk for lunch, and eat it right out of the box.”
Willmot said Haven Greens is also experimenting with different varieties.
“We’ve got green lettuces, red lettuces, and those flavour components. We’re also looking at different types of red lettuce that would come out as separate SKUs,” he said.
“Right now we call it baby green leaf, but there’s opportunity to launch a butter leaf product, a romaine product, and expand our flavour profile as well—integrating things like baby bok choy and different varieties like that within what we put out of the greenhouse.
“For us, a big part of why we started this business was the heavy Canadian reliance on imported greens. When I started researching this category and segment, we were importing in excess of 97% of the leafy greens Canadians ate every year. That struck me as wildly imbalanced.
“So that’s where we wanted to come in and start to shift that table a bit. It’s a big market—we can’t do it with just one greenhouse. There’s a lot of work to be done in the Canadian space to try to levelize that. Even to get it to 50% imports is a huge lift in terms of new infrastructure needed.
“The way we see it is until we’re pushing the Canadian market much closer to that balance point, or even favouring domestic production, we’re going to keep doing this. There’s really no reason to branch out at this time.
“But broadly there are more opportunities within indoor farming to bolster Canada’s advanced agri-food sector. We’re always keeping an eye on that as well. In the meantime, there’s too much work to do in leafy greens, and we’re going to focus on what we do.”
More from Retail Insider:
