With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/325830
q 124 BCBusiness July 2014 Quesnel is the founder and president of Sky Harvest, which is the optimistic-sounding name of a busi- ness that, in May 2013, started selling produce generated in a 13-square-metre indoor farm, located in an unlovely and under-used storefront building on Powell Street in East Vancouver. Ques- nel and a skeleton staff plant, grow, harvest and deliver microgreens, the "nutrient-dense, visually appealing and flavourful" early shoots from a host of salad-friendly vegetables. Sky Harvest currently offers 13 varieties, including arugula, kale, radish, sorrel, cilantro, sunflower and peas. They harvest most crops after only a week, when they're past the point of being "sprouts" but not yet "baby greens." Sky Harvest produce is crunchy, delightful and catnip to high-end chefs who love the flavour blast and the deli- cate texture. That means that the micro- product is also not cheap. For example, a 65-gram clamshell container of Sky Harvest's blend of "spicy mustard and purple cabbage," which you can order online from Spud.ca, costs $6.79. Pack three big panniers full of this stuff and it's more than worth the ride around town. That said, Quesnel is reticent to talk much about total sales numbers—in part, he says, because "I don't want to sound discouraging," and in part because he's competing both with other small local producers and with big commercial sup- pliers trucking produce from California in a business atmosphere that is hope- ful, but unforgiving. He allows that Sky Harvest has roughly doubled its output from last year, selling more in the first quarter of 2014 than in all three operat- ing quarters of 2013. But he's nowhere near to recovering a total investment to date of more than $50,000 (in materi- als, rent and unpaid time for himself and a former partner). And he's clear about this: the $1,000 a month that he's paying himself is "obviously… not sus- tainable," especially given that, even after subsidizing the first six months of operations with another job, he's had to tap his relatives and a line of credit to get the operation off the ground. "I obviously want a successful and sustainable business, [but] passion for changing the food system and creating a more livable city is the reason why I am willing to make financial sacrifices for the first year or so," he says. And that, in the niche world of urban agriculture, is the bottom line. Mark Hol- land, an urban planner and co-author of Agricultural Urbanism: Handbook for Building Sustainable Food Systems in 21st Century Cities, says that, in the current context, the whole romantic notion of relying upon urban agriculture to cre- ate food security is completely imprac- tical in most Canadian cities. Even if you had the infrastructure, you don't have the market: urban agriculturalists can't compete on price with the indus- trial machine that delivers refrigera- tor trucks full of California vegetables quickly and directly to the warehouses of Safeway, Costco and Save-On-Foods. Holland, who is now the vice-presi- dent of development for New Monaco, a healthy community project in Peach- When Quesnel returned to Canada, he ran into two problems. The first, notwithstanding his thesis work: he still had a lack of topical knowledge. For example, when I asked if he started Sky Harvest with strength in agriculture or in business, he said, "A bit of neither." He was a recreational gardener, but no botanist. And for business training, he wound up taking an entry-level course at the local yMCA p122-131-UrbanAgri_july.indd 124 2014-05-29 10:08 AM