Sweet potatoes

Sweet potatoes are a rapidly expanding crop in Canada. Their consumption has just exploded over the last five years, doubling to 1.5 kg per person per year – largely due to the popularity of sweet potato fries and the inclusion of sweet potatoes in everything from soups to pet food.

Add the local food movement to that upswing, and you’ve got growing demand for locally grown sweet potatoes. This is what led us to start growing our own a couple of years ago, as one of only a handful of farms in Ontario. Sweet potatoes can be a hard crop to grow in this province because it requires warm temperatures and sandy soils, and is particularly sensitive to frost.

The major sweet potato growing regions in North America are in the southern United States, where the climate is much warmer than it is here. That’s why we are working with researchers at the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre who are developing special sweet potato varieties that will thrive in our cooler climate and shorter growing season. This means we are growing test plots of new varieties to see how well they’ll grow in our area and evaluating the sweet potatoes they produce so we can help find the ideal varieties for the Canadian environment.

Green beans

We were the first supplier in Ontario to be able to offer customers green beans in handy, portion-sized plastic bags. Our innovation, which included building our own packing equipment, has led to establishment of a secondary market for beans in portion packs alongside the one for bulk beans.

The next great innovation…

We are here to help you turn your product ideas into reality. If you have a need for a specific product or packaging, for example, please give us a call and we’ll see how we can help and work together to bring a concept to market.