Leveraging technology originally developed at the University of Guelph for NASA to test the ability to grow life on Mars, Elevate Farms is building some of the worlds most cutting edge vertical farms. We invited the company's CEO and Founder Amin Jadavji to StartWell for this conversation that recounts the company's history and technology plus addresses food shortage problems brought to light by the pandemic and more.

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Qasim Virjee 0:29

Welcome back to the start well podcast I'm Qasim as always in this episode is our 37th episode. For those of you who are tuning in via YouTube or our digital magazine and enjoying us in clear, high definition, welcome to the studio. This is where we record all the podcasts. So feel free to look back on past episodes, where you can watch a bunch of the recent ones anyway, as well in video, and for everyone on Spotify, and, you know, iTunes, and everywhere else, I hope that we sound nice and clear. Alright, today I'm in studio with Amin Jadavji from Alevate Farms.

Qasim Virjee 1:07

The last episode around if you guys caught it was Ran Goel from Fresh City Farms. And so this is becoming a kind of a theme. You know, urban farming becomes vertical farming, and we're going to talk about what that is.

Qasim Virjee 1:21

So Amin welcome to the studio. It's a pleasure to have you here.

Amin Jadavji 1:24

Amazing. Thank you for having me.

Qasim Virjee 1:26

Yeah, of course, man. I'm excited. You know, it's funny for to fill people in. You know, we started we were going to do this podcast a week ago. And we ended up talking in this very room with the mics off. And it was an awesome experience. And we just talked and we talked and we talked and we do the same thing. I think today before I press record. So I hope the rest of you enjoy the conversation that we're about to have, because it's one that's already started. So I'm in Introduce yourself.

Amin Jadavji 1:52

Yeah, so my name is I'm in today I have g I'm founder CEO of Elevate farms. We're a vertical farming technology company, based here in Toronto.

Qasim Virjee 2:05

Let's back. Let's take it back a little bit. Tell me about you as an entrepreneur, your experience becoming or otherwise always being an entrepreneur, what's your business kind of? bio data?

Amin Jadavji 2:19

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I interesting, I think it's all sort of an evolution. So I started out as a 20, something year old out of university, joining what was then a fairly small family business manufacturing paper products. And I don't think I was probably a little naive, I thought I had a couple years get some work experience and move on. The reality is, we came up with a really good business plan, and that was focus on high volume, low margin us. seems straightforward enough. The implementation of that took about 20 years. Wow. So spent two decades really just building out that. That strategy?

Qasim Virjee 3:21

How old was the company before you spent two decades there? Well,

Amin Jadavji 3:26

it That in itself is probably another really long story of, you know, entrepreneurial journey from previous generations and immigrant immigrants into Canada from from East Africa. But maybe to frame it. As we came in to that the business was early 90s. We were in a recession, free trade had just come in. So what that meant was for at least for the paper industry, and for many other industries, that was prices suddenly got 17 and a half percent cheaper for American imports, like literally