What to know
- Oishii, a Japanese farming company, has brought their gourmet Koyo Berry strawberry to select Fortinos in the GTA.
- The strawberries costs $12.99 for a box of eight.
- Horticulture professor David Wees says these berries are grown in Plant Factories with Artificial Light (PFALs).
Would you buy $13 sustainably produced, gourmet strawberries?
Japanese vertical farming company Oishii has finally brought their line of specialty strawberries to the Toronto market, with the Koyo Berry now available at select Fortinos across Ontario.
The hype began earlier this month when the company posted an ad on Instagram with the tagline “Always ripe; Pesticide-free; Freshly picked” and the caption, “Something sweet is coming to the Greater Toronto Area. (Hint: It’s our premium Japanese strawberries.)”
Each pack of the Koyo Berry variety appears to come with eight strawberries that all look perfectly ripe and uniform.
David Wees, a horticulture and plant science professor at McGill University, says “plant factories” have allowed Japanese farmers to breed ‘perfect’ strawberries.
“What they’ve been doing in the past 10 to 15 years in Japan is trying to grow things in what they call plant factories, which is just a fancy name for completely indoor agriculture,” Wees says. “It’s not [in] a greenhouse, it’s not in a field. It would be as if you were growing plants inside a warehouse or your basement.”
The technical name for these controlled fruit farms is Plant Factories with Artificial Light or PFALs for short. And Wees says in theory, anything can be grown in PFALs, but strawberries are a safe bet because it’s an aesthetically pleasing high value fruit.
“It doesn’t have to be strawberries. You could do lettuce, tomatoes, corn if you wanted to. But I think they’ve been focusing on strawberries because it’s a very high value crop, and people are willing to pay good money for what they see as a perfect, esthetically perfect strawberry,” he says.
The packaging process for regular strawberries
Have you ever bought a box of strawberries from a grocery store and some of them are unripe while some others are mushy?
Wees says this unpredictability is because strawberries are such a fragile fruit. To prevent them becoming mushy during the delivery process, they’re always picked underripe. And unlike bananas, strawberries stop ripening as soon as they’re picked.
“When they’re not fully red, they’re not fully sweet. That leaves the berry more firm and therefore can withstand the vagaries of being loaded onto trucks, and sitting on a truck for three or four days before it gets shipped to the store. But the thing with strawberries, if you pick them under ripe, they basically stop ripening.”
The future of gourmet fruit in Canada
Wees predicts strawberries being the first — but not the last — genetically engineered fruit to enter the Canadian market. He says there are already a few growers in Canada who’ve started trying to cultivate raspberries indoors. But like strawberries, raspberries have some of the same challenges — like its fragility. According to Wees, raspberries are also easily mushed, so they don’t ship well over long distances.
“There’s been a bit of interest in trying to grow raspberries in what they call protected cultivation, which could be greenhouses or something like a greenhouse. So, raspberries might be another possible fruit to look at.” he says.
Currently, Wees says there’s one greenhouse southeast of Montreal that’s relatively large and there’s a couple smaller operations also in Montreal that already grow indoor strawberries all year round on a relatively small scale.
Editor’s Note: This article previously listed the Oishii berries as costing $30. But with increased supply, the cost has dropped significantly. The Koyo Berry sold at Fortinos across the GTA costs $12.99 for a box of eight.
