Organic produce has come a long way from farmers in hemp clothes peddling ugly vegetables to the big business it is today, available in nearly every grocery store in North America.
It’s easy to see how it got that far. Consumers liked it and demanded it. And successful conventional produce grower-shippers found a way to grow and deliver high quality organic fruits and vegetables.
Even before the mainstreaming of organic produce, greenhouse produce went through a similar lifecycle. The North American consumer could get exotic greenhouse tomatoes or peppers from Holland grown under glass. It was high-quality and different than domestic field grown.
Demand was so strong that smart investors built greenhouses in North America. They really built a lot in the past 25 years, especially in Canada. Maybe too many?
So investors are taking the next step into a different high-value item: cannabis.
Last summer at the United Fresh Expo in Chicago, I talked with Village Farms CEO Michael DeGiglio, who had recently announced the company would begin growing medical cannabis, which is legal in Canada, in a British Columbia greenhouse.
He was concerned what his vegetable customers thought about it, but he was more concerned about the health of the greenhouse vegetable industry.
Growth in vegetables is slowing, he told me, and the company needs to grow.
"It doesn't make sense to build more greenhouse (vegetable) production in Canada," he said.
Since then, other Canadian greenhouse companies have announced expansions into cannabis.
Earlier this year, Peter Quiring, owner and CEO of NatureFresh Farms, Leamington, Ontario, started GreenhouseCo., a joint venture with Wheaton Income/Cannabis Wheaton. Quiring, who also founded greenhouse fabricating company South Essex Fabricating Inc., will oversee construction of the new company's cannabis greenhouse in Leamington.
And late last year, Quebec-based Les Serres Stephane Bertrand, a large Canadian greenhouse grower of tomatoes, announced plans to begin growing cannabis through a partnership with Canopy Growth Corp., a company with medicinal and recreational marijuana brands.
Polls show a large majority of Canadians support legalizing marijuana for recreational use, which is not yet the law there, although it may be later in 2018. The medical version is legal with a prescription.
In the U.S., medical marijuana is legal in 29 states and recreationally in nine states, but it remains illegal under federal law. It’s stuck in a strange legal limbo.
Back to the greenhouse business, and this new crop that has strong consumer demand.
Should retailers be concerned if their vegetable supplier has a side business growing cannabis?
I think the best way to answer may be, would the majority of their customers be concerned?
If so, it seems too drastic to change suppliers over it, but it’s a good idea to be aware if consumers have questions. “No, the tomatoes are grown in an entirely different greenhouse as the medical cannabis,” a retailer’s consumer relations staff may need to explain.
Then again, if you’re in the nine states of the U.S. where marijuana is legal recreationally – think West Coast, Colorado and the Northeast – customers may see it as a bonus.
This column ran in the March/April 2018 print edition.