The Future of the Food Supply Chain Lives on a Rooftop in Montreal

Yes, you read that right! The world’s largest commercial greenhouse Lufa is located on top of the former Sears warehouse in Montreal’s northwestern semi-industrial district.

Early each morning, employees pick fresh vegetables and then carry them down, where they are placed in heavy plastic bags along with the rest of the grocery orders during the day.

This is the dream of a modern food man: an electronics store for advanced technology full of locally grown, pesticide-free, ethically sourced, reasonably priced products delivered once a week either on the doorstep or at a local pickup truck in your neighborhood. It is astonishing to think that Lufa was founded by two people who had never grown tomatoes before, let alone sold one.

To them, it looked like this: greenhouses on the roof that bring agriculture to the cities.

No pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides!

They are composting their green waste. Sale directly to the consumer the same day the food is collected. Catching and reusing rainwater. Reusable packaging. That’s what they have now — and they feed part of Montreal, Canada’s second-largest city.

Luffa was forced to exceed its operating capacity, and cracks began to show up in the systems and software that, by then, had done a great job of taking the company. Lufa temporarily closed the website and opened a waiting list.

Staff analyzed the pandemic trajectory and how they had to adapt to each step; reconfigured the floor of their warehouse to workers at stations farther away; then restarted to the capacity they could cope, gradually scaling each week until they hit their usual step. Today, they hum with around 25,000 baskets a week.