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
bCbusiness.CA July 2014 BCBusiness 129 the microgreen radish. Chefs also appreciate the freshness of the product and the care Quesnel takes in packaging. On this particular day, Pino Posteraro, head chef and owner of Cioppino's Mediterranean Grill, has cancelled his whole order, perversely, because Sky Harvest's output is too fresh and lasts too long. Posteraro had closed the restaurant the previous week for a winter break, returning to fi nd all of the previous week's order sitting in the fridge in perfect shape. "Look at this," he says, as his assistants pass one container after another out of the fridge. "It's perfect. I'm not going to throw this away." Posteraro hastens to note that he has a reputation among Vancouver suppli- ers as "a tough son of a gun." By way of illustration, he tells of a would-be micro- green competitor who had dropped off a large sample, 70 per cent of which Pos- teraro sent back. "The supplier phoned and said, 'What are you doing sending this back? It's a sample. It's free!'" To which Posteraro says he responded, "I don't care, it doesn't meet my standard. I don't want it here." For now, Quesnel is focused on the restaurant market, though he's hoping to expand his presence with Spud.ca, through which he now sells about 25 per cent of his total output. But the leap in scale is complicated. It's one thing to grow-to-order for a handful of top chefs; it's quite something else to start load- ing grocery store shelves at a wholesale level. That's also a huge issue for grocery stores, says Dave Wilson, the produce operations manager for Vancouver grocer Choices Markets. As much as Choices wants to stock local produce, it's hard for microproducers to deliver enough quantity to make it practi- cal, even for smaller and committed stores. That said, Choices buys all that it can—directly when possible, or indi- rectly through small, local wholesalers like Discovery Organics—but it can add cost and complication that's diffi cult to recover from shoppers comparing prices at Save-On or Superstore. The key, Wilson says, is to bring in high-value products, like garlic—or microgreens. That's a message that's gotten around. In fact, Sky Harvest is a new- comer to a market that was already being served, in a similar way, by the Vancouver Food Pedalers Cooperative, which Chris Thoreau founded six years ago. Thoreau also specializes in micro- greens and currently supports himself, two full-time partners and two part-time employees on the output they generate in a 40-foot shipping container that's also located in East Vancouver. Peter van Stolk, CEO of Sustainable Produce Urban Delivery (Spud.ca), the online grocer that delivers local and organic products to customers in six cities within North America, says this scale is typical. Spud delivers special order fresh and organic vegetables (and pretty much everything else on the grocery list) to clients from Pemberton to Hope. And of its 150 to 200 suppliers, van Stolk says "40 to 50 are über small and über local." Quesnel also insists that there is lots of market share to go around, noting that a much larger amount of product is still being trucked in from California—or even just from up the valley. For people who truly want to support local agriculture—with a superlight carbon footprint—Sky Har- vest and the Food Pedalers are there to compete. Peter Ladner, former Vancouver city councillor and author of the book Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities, says this is the way of the future—"maybe not the microgreen producer in his basement, but there is a lot of local potential just beyond the niche." Ladner identifi es two reasons for hope. First, there's an appetite from shoppers to buy local and pay more for it, he says, pointing to Save-On-Foods' ad campaign promoting the chain as the biggest buyer—and seller—of B.C. pro- duce. "I was on a panel with [Loblaws executive chair] Galen Weston," contin- ues Ladner, "and he said that when they can put a local sticker on produce, sales of that item immediately go up 40 per cent." The second factor, notwithstanding Mark Holland's reservations, is food security, Ladner says. We are not cur- rently paying for many of the exter- nalized costs of food that is grown a long way away and transported a great distance. We also ship billions of dol- lars and thousands of jobs out of the country whenever we overlook local potential in favour of imported food. Looking at the potential of a further bump in energy prices or a continuing drought in California, those conditions could change, suddenly—and dramati- cally in the favour of businesses like Sky Harvest. Aaron Quesnel will be ready. He's already working with a team of UBC engineering students on a plan to extend the second-storey fl oor space at the warehouse, expanding his growing room fi ve-fold (he was planning to at least double it by this summer). Quesnel was also, in late April, in the process of adding two more part-timers to his staff list (bringing the total to three part-time employees, as well as himself). And he's constantly working to expand the range of products. It's all part of the starting- small strategy: you have to be bold about building on your success. But as you watch Quesnel, riding down the street in a helmet that costs more than his bicycle, you can tell that he has a fi rm and conservative set of pri- orities. "When I did my thesis (in 2011), there were no rooftop greenhouses anywhere. Now there's the Lufa Farms greenhouses in Montreal and several in New York. It's coming." There's an appetite from shoppers to buy local and pay more for it. "i was on a panel with [loblaws executive chair] galen Weston, and he said that when they can put a local sticker on produce, sales of that item immediately go up 40 per cent," says peter ladner, former city councillor and food activist p122-131-UrbanAgri_july.indd 129 2014-05-29 10:08 AM