The farm in the city

One-time lawyer turns his attention to revamping a critical supply chain

RAN GOEL is breaking new ground in Canada’s food supply, quite literally. The Wall Street lawyer turned entrepreneur and founder of Fresh City Farms Inc. is in the midst of transforming 11 acres of Toronto’s Downsview Park into urban farmland with amenities to fuel his urban farming business, as well as provide opportunities to other innovators passionate about food sustainability.

“I think of this whole space as the platform for those eureka moments that will get people thinking about sustainability in food and eating more seasonally,” says Goel, who started Fresh City in 2011 as a pilot project in Downsview before expanding it into Canada’s largest commercial city farm.

The new space, a 20-year lease Fresh City has secured in the southern end of a park that was once a Canadian Forces base, will house a greenhouse, café, event space and about five acres of arable land expected to yield its first harvest this summer. “Our ultimate goal is to sell everything grown on this site,” Goel says. “I want to make this a destination spot where 100,000 people come to visit every year to buy their food.”

Fresh City will use 1.5 acres of the plot, and has partnered with other socially responsible entities to farm the rest. Among them is the YMCA, which will be running a summer camp teaching youth about farming, and Zawadi Farm, which has been successfully “rehabilitating” urban lands into growing spaces for marginalized communities since 2016. Proposals from other individuals, collectives or businesses interested in joining the group are welcome, too.

“When I started this company, it was never about growing all the food we eat in the city, but rather using urban farming as a tool to start connecting people to food and creating communities around food,” Goel says. “We’re trying to encourage a new generation of not just farmers, but food entrepreneurs.”

Urban farming is growing in popularity on a small scale as well. More than one million Canadian households are planning to grow food at home for the first time this year, according to a study by Angus Reid and Dalhousie University’s Agri-food Analytics Lab. Although three-quarters of Canadian gardeners enjoy it, 41% do it to save money, 12% are worried about food shortages and 3% do it to earn extra income.

Beyond the park, Fresh City has created its own food ecosystem

I think of this whole space as the platform for those eureka moments

in southern Ontario. Along with growing its own food (and supporting dozens of farmers to grow their own vegetables, herbs and flowers), it has two distribution centres and delivers products to 30,000 people weekly via its website subscription service. The company also owns eight brickand-mortar stores (two under the Fresh City banner, and six under the Healthy Butcher and Mabel’s Bakery & Specialty Foods, acquired in 2019). Up to 40% of Fresh City’s sales come from products made in-house, from croissants and breads to soups and salads in reusable jars.

Initially one of a dozen organic produce delivery services in the city, Fresh City is now the only one, having acquired its last competitor, Mama Earth Organics, this past February and it now has 525 employees. “As people are shopping online more and more, their expectations are getting higher and higher,” Goel says. “With Grocery Gateway, Voilà and all these other online purveyors, we needed some scale in order to compete.”

Goel says he’s not looking for more acquisitions any time soon,

but will focus on integrating Mama Earth to ensure there is no “friction” for existing customers. “We see a big opportunity in [Ontario’s] Golden Horseshoe to become an even better version of ourselves,” he says. “Better website, better merchandising, more interesting prepared foods, more delivery options — there’s a lot we can do.”

Goel didn’t have any food industry experience prior to starting Fresh City, apart from revelling in the stories his Israeli grandparents would share about working in a farming collective where fresh produce was abundant. He expected to get into socially responsible investing after law, but the financial crisis of 2008 got him thinking about our over-reliance on global supply chains, including food. He wanted to be a force for change and his hometown of Toronto seemed like the perfect spot to make it happen. “There was already a good food infrastructure here in terms of non-profits working in the industry and underappreciated farmland just outside of the city,” he says.

The business was bootstrapped for the first four years while Goel was still working in New York as a lawyer. His first investors joined in 2015 quite organically, he says, noting one expressed interest after a standard farm tour. A failed attempt to secure funding from CBC’S Dragons’ Den (he was on season 10) didn’t deter him either. “If anything, it made me realize [Fresh City] can’t be all things to all people,” he says.

Nevertheless, Goel has been successful in drawing support from several impact-focused investors, such as Good & Well Inc. and the Telus Pollinator Fund for Good. But he’s still unnerved by the narrow focus so many Canadian investors have. “It often amazes me how there is loads of money for fads like meal kits and cannabis that aren’t tackling the world’s to-do list, yet there are many opportunities (for investors) to try business models that can impact big change,” he says.

Pandemic aside, Goel says the next challenge will be to make sure his company’s vision isn’t caught up in the abundance of “greenwashing” from grocery giants touting mostly superficial sustainability measures, anything from claims of partially recycled packaging, he says, to displaying pictures of farmers when only 5% of produce is locally sourced. “There is a lot being thrown at consumers about sustainability,” he says, “and it’s incumbent on us to try to find a way to penetrate that noise and tell our story.”