Haven Greens' five-acre greenhouse in King City, Ontario, is producing about 10,500 pounds of fresh lettuce per day, barely a year after its first batches of baby lettuce reached Canadian retail, Canadian Packaging reported on 20 March 2026. The operation uses automation and AI to grow baby lettuce in a fully climate-controlled indoor environment with minimal human intervention. Founder and chief executive Jay Willmot said: "We are the first greenhouse in Canada where not a single human touches the crop, from sowing and seeding all the way out to harvest and going into the package."
Willmot says well over 90 per cent of the leafy greens consumed in Canada are imported from the U.S., which he sees as a food security and food sovereignty problem. The company's first retail shipments went to Toronto grocer Summerhill Market last spring, and Metro, Sobeys and Costco have since been added. Retailers now account for about 45 per cent of the business, and the company cites a 48-hour order-to-delivery turnaround.
A Mobile Gully System made up of conveyor belts and robotic arms guides gutters through each stage of cultivation, from soil filling to seeding. After seeding, gutters spend two days in a dark germination chamber, then return to the greenhouse to mature under tightly controlled temperature, humidity, light and moisture. Each gutter carries an RFID tag that is used to track plant health and maximize yield by adjusting the indoor environment as dictated by the AI-enabled central computer system. Growing takes about 24 days for green and red baby lettuce and 14 days for flavour varieties such as mustard and arugula.
The company says it controls lighting, irrigation and fertigation, climate, humidity, temperature and air pressure, and also measures outdoor weather continuously. Willmot said: "We collect data on everything we do, using multiple different sensors, advanced smart machine-learning algorithms, and narrow-band AI to drive a lot of the processes and make calculations to determine the most efficient path to achieving our goals." He added that there is constant interplay between the computing equipment, growers and production staff.
Packing is also automated. Lettuce is cut into loose leaves, portioned by a multi-head automatic weigh scale into trays and sealed by a MULTIVAC TX815 dual-track tray sealer. It runs at about 100 trays per minute and processes more than 40,000 trays per day, and packhouse personnel do not touch the product until sealed trays emerge. The packs have an 18-day shelf life.