Inside a secure lab, in an environment-controlled chamber sealed by a one-tonne stainless-steel door, sits an innovation that may be worth millions: rows of perky green strawberry plants. Some of the chambers glow beneath magenta lights, others bright blue, others warm yellow. One of these "light recipes," the scientists monitoring the strawberries hope, will be the key to unlocking a prize: a way to grow fresh berries in Canada year-round.
Growing them isn't the hard part. These lab-grown strawberries are already perfect specimens, as red-ripe and juicy as if they came out of a sunny field in July. The challenge is to grow them at a scale and for a price that can compete with the imported berries that flood into Canada for the majority of the year.
Canadian diets are heavily dependent on fruits and vegetables grown in other countries. We imported almost $6.2 billion more fresh and frozen fruit in 2022 than we exported, an all-time-high trade deficit that allowed us to eat kiwis and blueberries in the depths of February. But a pandemic, wars and the steadily thumping drumbeat of climate change have all exposed the fragility of this system, contributing to eye-popping grocery prices and foods even occasionally disappearing from the produce aisle.
"There's certainly nothing wrong with global trade. But you've got to have some sort of resiliency when things hit the fan," says Thomas Graham, Kensana Research Chair in Controlled Environment Systems at the University of Guelph, one of the lead scientists monitoring the magenta-lit strawberries.
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