Corey Ellis and Alida Burke were business majors at the University of Ottawa in 2015, touring the far North with a student club focused on creating business models to make a positive social impact.

The tour took them to Iqaluit, Nunavut, where they heard and saw firsthand how the high cost of fresh food that had to be flown in threatened Northerners’ food security. They also heard about some people trying to grow produce in shipping containers.

“We said, ‘This is really interesting. We’d be really excited about getting involved,’” Ellis recalls. “What started as a summer project essentially has become the last decade of our careers.”

Neither Ottawan had a farming background let alone a green thumb. But the more they investigated a technology called modular vertical farming, the more they decided it was the right business for them.

“Why we like vertical farming, especially in the North, is it solves an affordability issue, it solves a food quality and nutrition issue, and it can be a sustainable business venture,” Ellis, CEO of Growcer, said in an interview with Research Money.

“That's why we got into this. It checked our box that this is something that can earn a living for someone while also being a good for the community.”

NASA pioneered vertical farming techniques starting in the 1990s, developing nutrient delivery techniques, LED lighting and hydroponic and aeroponic systems to grow food without sunlight for long-duration space missions.

Ellis and Burke, who’s Growcer’s chief financial officer, co-founded their company to offer a vertical farming solution to co-op grocery stores, schools, community colleges, First Nations, non-profit organizations, church groups and other community groups.

They bootstrapped their startup for the first seven years. They credit RBC for providing some initial funding, right from when the RBC Foundation funded their fact-finding tour to the North.

The business partners also participated in a provincially supported Startup Garage, a year-round incubator program at the University of Ottawa. The program offers up to $12,000 in grant funding to students to work on their businesses.

“That was the entire startup capital of the business,” Ellis said. “We were just rubbing two nickels together to make a dime for a long while, just making ends meet by putting one foot in front of the other.”

Growcer’s next source of capital was its customers who started to buy the company’s vertical farming solution.

Growcer has been in business for 10 years this year. About two years ago, the company brought in a few angel investors, friends and family and people in the business community that Ellis and Burke got to know over the years and who served as mentors.

In May 2024, the company raised $3 million in Series A funding in an all-equity round  co-led by building-services provider Modern Niagara, cleantech investor Jeff Westeinde, and Jeff York, the former co-CEO of Ottawa-based upscale grocery chain Farm Boy.

The investment was meant to “supercharge” the business and get it to a place where it was growing, Ellis said.

“But even to this day, we feel like we just want to build this thing with a long-term mindset, a past-10-years mindset, which doesn't really line up with the timeline that VCs generally look for,” he said.

Growcer expands globally through an acquisition

In 2025, Ellis and Burke got the opportunity to buy all the assets, including physical assets, intellectual property and customers of bankrupt U.S. vertical farming company Freight Farms, which operated in all 50 U.S. states as well as in many other countries around the world.

Freight Farms had raised about $100 million in venture capital and private equity and chased an aggressive growth pattern, but the firm made mistakes along the way in business execution – especially in keeping all their customers happy and coming back for repeat business, Ellis said.

“In our business, our biggest source of sales is our existing customers. Our customers continue to come back to us year after year to grow and scale their projects,” he noted. “That’s something I'm super proud of because it means that what we’re delivering is adding value, is working, that our customers want to grow with us.”

Many of vertical farming’s high-profile global companies sank hundreds of millions of investor capital into operations before closing or declaring bankruptcy. Aerofarms, Bowery, InFarm, and Plenty are just a few of them.

Growcer bought all of Freight Farms assets for $2.6 million. That immediately grew Growcer’s customer base multiple times and gave the company access to customers in over 30 countries that are now part of the Growcer network.

“What we've now done is we took a business that was very unprofitable and we've reached the point now where that business is sustainable, and we want to invest heavily into that business to make the product better, make the customer experience better,” Ellis said.

Growcer’s vertical farming units cost $250,000 plus shipping, and they are made at the company’s factory in Winkler, Man. Each unit is 40 feet long, 10 feet high and 10 feet wide, taking up the space of four parking spots.

Food is grown hydroponically, using a mix of nutrients and water to feed plants instead of soil. Automated lighting and temperature controls contribute to the efficiencies gained in vertical farming. A typical crop can be harvested in a matter of weeks.

The “plug and play” farms can yield up to 10,000 pounds of fresh produce per year in temperatures as cold as -40ºC.

Growcer now has deployed more than more than 125 units across Canada, providing fresh food to approximately 50,000 Canadians a day – including  over a dozen units in Canada’s North.

“You need a certain amount of humility to work in the North when you’re not a Northerner,” Ellis noted. He and Burke spent over two years just listening and learning from Northerners about their priorities and what they had tried that hadn’t worked.

“More than nine times out of 10, the project is achieving the goals we set for it. For each one of the farms, most of the time the project performs quite well and most of those projects are still running today,” Ellis said.

He pointed to the Rocket Greens farm on Hudson’s Bay in Churchill, Man., operated by the Churchill Northern Studies Centre. The “green” in the farm’s name stands for the leafy green arugula (plus “Rocket” is also another name for arugula), and the “Rocket” is because the vertical farm is located near an old decommissioned research rocket range.

“There’s a lot of community support. We were able to reduce the price of food by 50 percent at the grocery store,” Ellis said.

“Where the community has bought in, they’ve really bought in and they fall in love with the project. It becomes their project, not ours. They own it and the community embraces it,” he said. “That’s why we exist. That’s why we got into this.”

Growcer’s pay-to-own plan and philanthropic campaign enable more organizations to get into vertical farming

Growcer’s vertical farming units can be located anywhere there’s a reliable power supply. The company has dozens of units deployed in remote fly-in communities that depend on diesel-fuelled generators. The amount of electricity a unit uses is similar to that of a single home.

Finding the right person to run a vertical farming unit is important, Ellis noted. “When I look at our network and pick the top best-performing projects, it's always because they have a passionate person behind the scenes who's making everything happen.”

The technical gardening aspects of vertical farming can be learned, and Growcer has made that much easier to do, he added. “All we look for really is someone who's keen to learn and is motivated,” he said.

“We call that person a champion. They're the leader of the project. They're the force of nature that makes everything happen. And that linchpin is the biggest most important thing.”

Growcer is best known for its hydroponic farming units for growing vegetables. But increasingly, the company is building and deploying other types of food infrastructure projects that communities want.

During the last few years, Growcer has developed a root cellar for storing root vegetables grown in the vertical farms. The company also offers a modular kitchen facility for light food processing, along with community freezers and community fridges for storing fish and other protein.

All these products are prefabricated, modular buildings and pieces of infrastructure that can be replicated and built dozens and dozens of times over, Ellis said. “That way we reduce the price for our customers and it's always food-related.”

The biggest barrier for organizations wanting to get into vertical farming is the upfront capital cost of buying a unit.

So Growcer offers a program called the “Growcer Fund” that lets customers pay a security deposit and then buy-to-own their vertical farming unit by paying $4,000 a month.

“You pay 4,000 a month and, just like a mortgage, you pay off your balance over time and you earn your farm at the end of the term,” Ellis said.

“Our goal is – it always goes back to the roots of why we started this – we want to help as many people as possible,” he added.

In March this year, Growcer also launched a philanthropic campaign, called “Fresh Solutions to Community Hunger,” that brings together Canadian philanthropists to fund up to 30 percent of the cost of a vertical farming unit for charities that serve food security organizations in their communities. The charities will raise the other 70 percent.

The goal is to raise $15 million, of which $5 million has already been raised. All the money will be donated to charities with aim of bringing vertical farming to 100 more communities across Canada over the next three years, Ellis said. “The goal here again is to just keep reducing the barrier so it becomes easier and easier for organizations to be able to afford to do this.”

“We've got a great group of donors already that really care about Canada and the country’s ability to feed itself,” Ellis said. “We’re trying to find other likeminded people who are philanthropists or business leaders who can say, ‘You know what, I want to support five or 10 charities to do this.’”

How government could help remove barriers and incentivize more local food production

In January this year, the Mark Carney government committed to developing a National Food Security Strategy focused on strengthening domestic food production from the ground up.

For the 2025-2026 fiscal year, the federal government has committed approximately $203.3 million in direct funding for food supplementation and security in Canada's North through the Nutrition North Canada program and its associated initiatives.

Last November, Ellis testified before the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, making an urgent case for federal recognition of local food infrastructure as essential to Canadian sovereignty and security.

One in four Canadians – over 11 million people – now live in food-insecure households, while the ingredients in the average Canadian meal travels over 2,000 kilometers, leaving communities vulnerable to climate shocks, trade wars and supply chain disruptions, he pointed out.

Government could help attract private capital investment in Canadian vertical farming and other local food infrastructure with policy that incentivizes this investment, Ellis said.

“I don't think any entrepreneurs are looking for a hand-out from government,” he added. Rather, they’re look for a demand signal from government and from Canada to be a better customer to Canadian entrepreneurs and startup builders.

Ellis pointed out that Growcer’s customers can already access federal programs, including Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Local Food Infrastructure Fund, for support to help buy a vertical farming unit or other local infrastructure.

But government could strengthen the demand signal to domestic and global investors by being the first customer for Canadian agricultural infrastructure, he said.

Among his eight recommendations to the Senate committee are that government should explicitly recognize modular farms, root cellars, community freezers and related food storage infrastructure as eligible assets within federal community infrastructure programming.

He also suggested adding a local food procurement mandate to Ottawa’s newly permanent National School Fund Program, to further incentivize local food production.

Government also should extend flow-through share eligibility to controlled-environment agriculture and domestic food production projects to unlock private capital – mirroring natural resource models, Ellis recommended.

He also recommended modernizing federal tax treatment by classifying modular farms as active agricultural machinery, by extending accelerated expensing to modular farm buildings.

Another thing that would help is regulatory harmonization, Ellis told Research Money. Growcer has 13 different building codes across provinces and territories that it has to comply with. Plus each municipality treats vertical farming differently in terms of regulations, codes and permits.

In several cities, modular farms – which are indoor, emissions-free and low-noise – are nevertheless classified as industrial manufacturing uses, preventing placement near schools, grocery co-ops, or community centres.

“Every farm we build is identical,” Ellis noted. “And yet we face a new inspection process with new questions, things we've never seen before. And every time it's a battle – uphill battle, mind you – against the inspector to get this approved. And it can take a year.”

That sort of red tape and potential delay in actually operating controlled-environment modular farms will chase off investors, who “get very easily spooked” and will instead invest where there’s no such barrier, Ellis said.

If there could be one National Building Code and one Canadian Electrical Code that worked everywhere across the country for agricultural infrastructure, he added, “that will start to send a signal [to investors] that we're open for business and our country is a great place to earn our return.”

Ellis pointed out to the Senate committee that modular agriculture is taxed as if it were generating passive investment income rather than operating as an active agricultural business. “This elevates tax burdens for operators and investors.”

“The result is reduced competitiveness relative to jurisdictions such as the United States, where favorable depreciation and deduction rules significantly lower investment risk,” he said.

Making Canada’s food production system less dependent and more resilient

Growcer’s globally deployed infrastructure – 1,000+ installations across 30+ companies – currently has the capacity to feed 500,000 people a day, Ellis said. But the company’s vision is to grow this by 10 times or more while reducing the cost of food by half of what it is today.

Canada is already a food an agriculture “superpower,” he said. “What we're doing is more and more of what agriculture will look like – not displacing current agriculture. There will be a blend, room for all at the table for all types of different forms of agriculture.”

“We see ourselves wanting to export the knowledge we've created here in Canada and be a global leader in the field that we're operating in,” he said.

Most of Canada’s lettuce is imported from the Salinas Valley in California – just one example of the country’s heavy reliance on other regions and countries for its fresh vegetables and fruits.

“It's not a matter of if or when there's more droughts that happen in that part of the world or something happens or a trade disruption,” Ellis said. “When we're so dependent on a single region or a single way of production, a single monocropping style, it makes us pretty vulnerable.”

The demand for emergency food support in Canada continues to outpace supply, while food inflation, housing costs, climate disruption and supply chain instability drive the need even higher.

It makes sense for Canada to diversify its agricultural infrastructure and create more strength and more resiliency in the system, Ellis said. “We could have both types [of agriculture] in the system so that one thing gets affected, it doesn't wipe out the whole supply, which is currently the way it's built.”

Ellis noted that at the core of what Growcer is building is the assumption that there will always be a level of unpredictability in the world.

“So what I see is Canada is 90 to 95 percent reliant on imports for all of our fruits and vegetables. We'll never grow bananas in Canada, but we sure can grow spinach and strawberries and peppers and tomatoes,” he said.

“There’s a lot we can grow to feed our own people. We need to be doing more of it.”

Editor’s note: Growcer is one of only five organizations across Canada to receive the 2026 Governor General’s Innovation Award.

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