Hey there,
Our guest today is Corey Ellis, the co-founder and CEO of Growcer, an Ottawa-based vertical farming startup that’s quickly becoming an industry leader.
Corey and his co-founder, Alida, started their journey on a trip to Nunavut where they saw the impact of our broken food system first hand. In the 10+ years since, they’ve built a business that’s outlasted hype cycles and is creating food sovereignty and more sustainable food systems in communities across Canada - and now around the world.
In this episode:
What’s not working in our food system - and where vertical farming can solve for food sovereignty and sustainability
How they leveraged customer criticism to expand into food storage and financing
Why Corey opted not to take VC funding - and why he doesn’t think it’s suitable for vertical farming
TALKING POINTS
7:40 - What’s broken in our food system and why boring problems like distribution and shelf life matter
11:03 - How modular farms cut food waste and fertilizer use - but aren’t a silver bullet
16:51 - How Growcer turned customer criticism into their best R&D engine
19:19 - What real food sovereignty looks like when communities own their infrastructure
24:34 - The “vertical farming” hype cycle and why most players got it wrong
39:37 - Borrowing lessons from real estate to finance climate infrastructure
50:59 - Solving hard problems and building culture from first principles
Listen now: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Wherever you get your podcasts
Deep Dive
What we eat and how it’s grown has a bigger impact on the climate than we probably think. Just over a quarter of the world’s emissions come from food production.
But to Corey Ellis, this isn’t just a production problem - it’s a distribution and shelf life problem.
Half of all food produced in Canada never gets eaten. Instead, much of it gets lost in transportation and processing or goes bad on grocery store shelves and in fridges. Food waste alone contributes more carbon pollution than aviation, and costs Canada almost $50 billion dollars.
Growcer builds modular vertical farms that can be deployed close to where food is consumed, growing high quality food that stays fresh longer. Growing indoors means swapping fertilizer and land inputs for electricity and water, often leading to a lighter environmental footprint (although Corey will be the first to say it’s not a silver bullet).
The impact extends beyond climate though:
People waste less money at the grocery store
Schools use the farms as a classroom, creating a lifelong connection to food
More people find agriculture as a career at a time when Canada and much of the world is losing its farmers
Long-term, Corey sees a future where more food production is decentralized and ownership is in the community’s hands, rather than centralized in industrial systems.
It’s a different approach than what we’ve typically seen in vertical farming, where companies have doubled down on technology, automation, and large-scale farms while chasing VC dollars to make the economics work. A few years later, many of those companies have gone under with some multi-billion dollar failures.
Corey thinks vertical farming just isn’t suitable for venture capital, which needs 10x returns or better to make the numbers work. Growcer’s focus on customers, building for the long-term, and picking the right markets to expand have helped them avoid the fate of many of their competitors.
Takeaways
A few things that stuck with me from our conversation:
Localization is a powerful lever for driving climate impact. Producing near the point of consumption is becoming more viable and resource efficient than centralized mass production in some areas.
Think like an integrator. Corey sees Growcer as an integrator, not just a farm. They’re looking at how they can connect to other modular systems to increase their impact. For example, Corey’s thinking about how battery storage could power their farms with low-cost electricity overnight and help balance the grid.
Transparency matters. It would be easy to hype up the climate impact of vertical farming - we replaced fertilizer with clean electricity! But the climate benefit depends on where the electricity comes from, and what that grid mix looks like. Whether its communicating their environmental impact clearly or communicating with customers, transparency is key to Growcer’s long-term plans.
Justin
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