Japanese vertical farming company Oishii has brought its 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.
© Oishii
David Wees, a horticulture and plant science professor at McGill University, says "plant factories" have allowed Japanese growers 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.
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