TORONTO — The Weston Family Foundation has announced four Canadian teams selected for the Scaling Phase of the Homegrown Innovation Challenge, a $33 million initiative launched in 2022 to develop sustainable, domestic food production systems. This phase supports the development of year-round, cost-competitive berry production systems in Canada.

Each team will receive up to $5 million over three years to scale their solutions from concept to farm-level implementation. The goal is to demonstrate systems that can sustainably produce berries such as strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries year-round in Canada.

Berries aren’t an easy crop to grow in greenhouses and vertical farms. Ophelia Sarakinis, founder of Gush (a vertical strawberry farm in Montreal), Katia Kouloumprouka Zacharaki, consultant plant scientist at InnoPhyte, and Rodrigo Santana, co-founder and CEO of Beritech, Inc. (a Canadian ag tech company that creates systems for year-round raspberry and blueberry production), addressed the challenges associated with berry production during their panel at Indoor Ag-Con last week. While the market for CEA berries has profitability potential, the panelists agreed that progress needs to be made before growers can tap into it.

“There’s no ‘berry’ profitable in CEA, just profitable,” Santana said. “We’re on the road to profitability, but we aren’t there quite yet.”

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Still in its infancy in Quebec, aeroponics could soon enter a new era, judging by the ambitions of Éric and Antoine Deschambault. With the help of Université Laval, father and son are fine-tuning a large-scale, largely automated production system, which will eventually be sold on a turnkey basis to various entrepreneurs.

It may sound like science fiction, but the goal couldn’t be more earthly: cheaper groceries.

Berries are being grown inside a unique tunnel north of London and if the system that utilizes solar energy, lights, heat pumps and water pumps works, it will cheat Canadian winters and climate change and undercut the price of imported fruits and vegetables, said Joshua Pearce, a Western University electrical engineering professor.

A team from the University of Guelph is taking part in a research challenge to grow off-season strawberries in Canada.

Two University of Guelph-led research teams aiming to change the way fresh produce is grown in Canada have entered the second phase of the Homegrown Innovation Challenge, a $33-million challenge prize to grow berries out of season and at scale in Canada. The initiative is funded and delivered by the Weston Family Foundation. 

The Homegrown Innovation Challenge is an XPRIZE-style competition trying to jumpstart the new grocery-store reality by offering millions of dollars in prize money to teams finding ways to grow berries out of season and at scale in Canada.

Local universities team up to revolutionize berry cultivation.

In an ambitious effort to meet the increasing demand for raspberries year-round, researchers from Bishop’s University (BU) and Université de Sherbrooke (UdeS) are pioneering a sustainable agricultural technique that could revolutionize berry cultivation in Canada. The project, titled “CANberries,” involves extending the natural growing season of raspberries to ensure availability irrespective of traditional seasonal limitations and climate conditions.

Leading this innovative endeavor are Dr. Mirella Aoun of the Department of Environment, Agriculture and Geography at BU, and Dr. Sébastien Poncet from the Faculté de Génie at UdeS.