Most of the spots for lease at The Grove are now full

An ambitious project to turn old buildings into space for growing food and agriculture businesses is already getting close to capacity.

The Grove at the Western Fair District in London has 20 spaces for innovators and 16 are either filled or spoken for a tour of The Grove was told during the London Farm Show, March 7.

Why it matters: New food businesses create demand for farm products, providing new markets.

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The tour was part of the first in-person meeting of the Ag Robotics Working Group, an informal organization of agriculture technology companies, venture capital, government and private funders, educational institutions and others interested in technology and farms.

An agricultural robotics hub is being developed in space reserved for it at The Grove.

Reg Ash, CEO of the Western Fair Association, which holds tightly to its roots as an agricultural society despite being located in the centre of the city, said that the route to The Grove started in 2015 when the board of directors funded a white paper and set the path for the Western Fair District to focus on agriculture.

A launch in 2019 and FedDev funding in 2020 set the stage for big changes in the space, and the first tenant set up on site in 2021.

Aging buildings on the site once used for farm shows and many other events, like the Canada Building and the Progress Building needed new life.

Those buildings now are full of gleaming test kitchens, a new shared packaging line which is expected to be in operation in the next few weeks. During the London Farm Show tour, workers for different small food companies were cutting meat, putting snacks into packages and getting ready for meal-sized cooking in different rooms in the shared commercial kitchen space.

The Grove is tied in with other organizations and groups, such as economic development agencies in London, which feed potential small companies into The Grove. The non-profit Small Business Centre in London has fed several leads to The Grove.

“There’s all these collaborators that bring things to the table,” he says.

The Western Fair District’s farmer’s market has also hosted the first attempts at new food products, which have then moved into The Grove when they’ve needed to scale their production, says Ash.

An example is The Fritter Shop, which Ash says started as an idea from a New Year’s Eve party that turned into a booth in the market, and now rents 3,500 square feet at The Grove, and produces 1,000s of fritters a day.

The Grove also houses other agriculture technology businesses in its office spaces, such as Intelliculture, with space for software developers and services.

The next step is to see if the model can be replicated elsewhere. Ash says there are numerous agriculture societies in Ontario, Canada and elsewhere in the world, which could use the same model.