InFarm is partnering with Sobeys, one of the largest food retailers in Canada, to sell its vertically grown greens in grocery stores across the country. The Berlin, Germany-based indoor agriculture company plans to be in an additional four of 10 Canadian provinces by 2023. The deal will place InFarm in over 1,000 retail locations across Canada.
InFarm’s original entry into Canada happened in March 2020, when the company brought its small, pod-like modular farms to Sobeys stores, Thrifty Foods, and Safeway Canada, all subsidiaries of the Empire Company. These smaller farms can be placed directly in the produce section of a grocery store or nearby, making it possible for retailers to harvest greens onsite and sell them directly to consumers faster.
For InFarm, this most recently announced expansion also means constructing more of its InFarm Growing Centers, which the company says are “growth, production and distribution hubs” that also hold high-capacity vertical farms. The company first announced these centers at the beginning of 2021, saying it had 15 of them either planned or under construction across major urban centers.
Modularity is the underlying principle behind both the pod farms in produce sections and the larger Growing Centers. The size of these farms can change depending on where they are located. As InFarm CEO Erez Galonska told The Spoon earlier this month, this modularity allows the company to respond to demand faster in any given area since it takes less time to launch a smaller farm compared to some of the industrial-sized operations out there. “If you think of larger-scale farms, they require a lot of upfront investment and can take some time to set up,” he said. “We took a modular approach to help address this, reducing the amount of cash needed to start operations and speeding up the process.”
In today’s announcement, InFarm said that its new deal with Sobeys comes in response to demand, and that it will increase production volume in Canada by sevenfold. New Growing Centers are planned for Calgary, Halifax, and Winnipeg. A site in Hamilton, Ontario will eventually host InFarm’s largest Growing Center in North America.
Over the next five years, InFarm plans to expand its selection of produce to include tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, mushrooms, salads and potted plants. The company plans to have 100 growing centers in operation by 2025.
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