A farm in Lambton Shores that specializes in selling seedlings, has been planted on a list of the top growing companies in Canada.
Roelands Plant Farms placed 314 among 400 on The Globe and Mail’s Top Growing Canadian Companies for 2020.
Owners Jodi and Adrian Roelands opened the now 17-acre greenhouse propagation facility in 2013.
Jodi said it's exciting and an honour to be named to a list filled with so many amazing entrepreneurs.
"It's been a really busy seven years for us, getting this business up and going. We have five small children running around, so to have a growing a family and a growing business, it's quite something to be included, but definitely we have an amazing team [of 120 employees] that we work with and definitely couldn't have done it without them."
Roelands said they started off with just four acres and wanted to grow quickly.
"We kind of had a 10-year-plan -- we wanted to get up to about 12 acres, was our goal -- but because the greenhouse industry is expanding so quickly, our customers were demanding more plants and so there was a lot more room for growth more quickly than we had imagined," said Roelands. "So we achieved our 10-year-plan in I think three years and then it's expanded past that and have plans for further expansion beyond 2021 as well."
She said their main business is vegetable seedlings that are wholesaled to greenhouses that then grow the vegetables, and the other side of the business is a new brand called Plantables, which is selling garden vegetable seedlings online direct to consumers.
Roelands said they have had quite a steep growth curve in the Plantables component of the business due in part to the pandemic.
"With everything shut down, people with lots of time at home wanting to do gardening but then not being able to get plants, it was quite a growth rate on that part of our business, for sure."
Roeland said they have more plans to expand with an additional four acres of greenhouse being construction, slated for completion in spring of 2021.
The farm was the only Sarnia-Lambton company to earn a spot on the Globe and Mail's list with three-year growth of 107 per cent.