S01E03 Ran Goel

Jared Hey everyone. Welcome to The Possible Now, a podcast interview series with the people and businesses who are working towards a better future for us all. My name is Jared Henriques and I'm your host this season. I'm the founder of Renga, a brand strategy and design studio in Toronto. Our goal at Renga has been to help our clients become brands that matter.

In order to do this effectively, we felt it was important to better understand what sustainability looks like in practice across different industries. The Possible Now is a front row seat to a series of conversations with business leaders who are solving real world problems with sustainable practices.

We're excited to share our research with you in this way, a better future is possible, and it will take all of us as business leaders, consumers, and citizens to start working towards it.

Today, I'm going to be speaking with Ran Goel. Ran is the founder and CEO of Fresh City Farms, Canada's largest commercial city firm. Today, we're going to be talking a bit about his past and how it led him on his journey of food.

Ran brings a lot of interesting perspectives based on the different experiences in his life. He grew up in South Africa during apartheid, worked in investment law in New York city, and now he is into commercial city farming. Rand's view on sustainability, specifically what we can do as individuals, is a key takeaway from this interview.

So I wanted to start off by saying thank you. You know, we're recording this in May 2020 and in the middle of the pandemic. Unlike most of our guests that life is slowing down for, I would assume that life is not slowing down for you right now.

How's everything going?

Ran That's very accurate! Things are going pretty well all in all. If you asked me this probably a month and a half ago you'd get a different answer, but I think time has given us some perspective. It's been a roller coaster, we've got hit by this wave of demand starting in mid March, March 13th to be precise, and the whole operation went into overdrive to try to meet that demand. At the same time, do it safely. So we've seen obviously a lot of anxiety amongst staff around COVID. We've had to take a lot of measures, to minimize the risk of transmission internally, but knowing full well, I've been pretty straightforward and transparent.

My staff, we're not going to be able to minimize the risk to zero, so we can't get you to a place, that you would be if you were just staying home and isolating. I think it's an important message to put out there. Ultimately we are frontline workers and we do undertake and assume a certain level of risk by working cash at a grocery store, or coming into the kitchen, or delivering orders to people's homes. We've done our best to compensate staff more, and certainly provide the with all the PPE that we had access to and now have much more access to.

It's been a ride as a leader. It's been a really challenging time but also full of growth to try to shepherd the company through this period.

Jared It sounds like quite a challenge, not only the challenge of scaling a business, which is already difficult, but dealing with that amidst, all of the other external factors I imagine is quite the challenge.

I wanted to jump back because as I was looking into a bit of your background. I saw that you spent a good chunk of your time in investment law and at wall street, and then I see that this guy is running a commecial city farm. Talk to me about that transition. Where did you really get your start in sustainable impact business thinking

Ran It's a good time to ask that question.

To give you the sense of the timeline. I started practicing law in New York city in October, 2007. If you know anything about the timeline of the financial crisis, that was kind of right when it really started getting bad. When I got there to practice law, it was still like The Bonanza times, if you will. So a lot of expense accounts, our partners, and clients would take us out to really nice dinners and lunches. There was a really kind of heady time. And then lo and behold, within six months or so, big business failures of Bear Stearns and then Lehman brothers, and then the landscape there changed really quickly.

For me, I knew I wanted to do something different with my life that I felt was more meaningful, I didn't know what it was going to be though. Ultimately, the financial crisis in a way steered me towards food through a very weird series of thought processes, if you will. But, basically around the time the crisis happened when I landed in New York, I started reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, which was to me and I think to many thousands of other people, was the first thing you read about food really. Aside from say a cookbook or something like that, that looked at food in a holistic way, in a political way, and as a system as a whole.

So, outside of the confines of academia, I don't think people really have a sense how our food system works and whether or not it's sustainable. What impact it's having on animal health, human health, and ecological health. I started reading Michael Pollan, and the interesting thing was, at base, you know what the financial crisis was about, if you step back, it was a crisis of confidence, right? So suddenly these acronyms NBS, ABS, RMBS, all these mortgage backed securities and all these weird financial instruments, they suddenly weren't worth as much as people thought they were. Like a lot of elements of our capital markets, basically value is derived from confidence of our belief in what the future holds, and that really got me. I don't know if it was a Eureka moment for me, but I realized if you look at this system, and in my case, in terms of the world that I was in at the time: investment system and capital flows, you realize the assumptions that you have about a system are often incorrect. The whole edifice could be built on quicksand, and that's exactly what happened.

These Titans of wall street were brought to their knees overnight and had to be rescued by the government. I started thinking about food in the same way, where you'd walk into a supermarket and you will see, pineapples from Costa Rica, avocados from Ecuador, lamb from New Zealand, and cheese from Italy. And you think, this is a perfectly functioning system. It works beautifully. It's bringing me food from all over the world. A bounty a King 200 years ago couldn't have enjoyed.

On one level, it just seems like this food system is an unparalleled success. Nobody that I know is going hungry. Most people in our country are not going hungry. I think, even if people don't think of it in those terms, like make those assumptions explicit, there's this idea that food is not a big thing to worry about for the average person in Canada. I found that really interesting once you actually start digging deeper into our food system and you realize: a)there's all these assumptions that may or may not be true, and b)if you actually look at the impacts of our food system, we might not recognize it day to day because it's happening slowly, or it's not going to happen for a few more decades. But it's actually not that sustainable, from a human perspective or from an ecological perspective.

To me, the mirroring of immersing myself in food writing at that time, 12 years ago now, 13 years ago, and what was happening on wall street and then main street, as well in the States, was just a very incisive combination. You realize this thing that you think is working perfectly actually may not be. Maybe it's not built on the right foundation. So, I started reading about food and basically I got obsessed with farming in the city, and I got obsessed with it because I thought it was a way to get people connected with food. About how food is produced and through that, giving them a sense of, what's the implication, what the stakes are.

So what does it take to grow food? How is a laborer that grows food treated? What are we doing to the soil when we grow food? What kind of food are we growing? How much better food can taste if it's fresh and if it's locally made. I thought urban farming was just this great way to create this mind shift. Ultimately, I think that's what a lot of this is about. We often reach for technological solutions for our problems. If you think about climate change, if we think about issues in the farming system, in the food system, we often think we need to figure out this clean technology. Or, if Elon Musk saves us by creating electric cars, we often think of it in those terms. For most of our problems, technology would be helpful, but it's not always clear that it in and of itself is going to solve the problem. It actually takes human will to decide this is a kind of society we want, and this is what we're going to prioritize. Technology may be a tool in achieving that, but this idea that, somehow the technology is going to land in our lap, it's going to solve X or Y problem is rarely the case. Often it has, if it's not regulated right, or not developed right, it actually has all these other issues. With Facebook, on the one hand it brings people together. You can communicate with your uncle in Sweden or whatever, but on the other hand, it was hijacked to undermine your electoral processes.

I don't have as much faith in technology solving our problems in and of itself. I think it needs to be harnessed for good, if you will. In my mind, urban farming was a way to really get food on people's agenda, get people thinking about food, so that they are both as consumers, and I'd say much more importantly, as citizens, are making better choices. And frankly, thinking about food when they're making choices, because until, say two months ago, and we'll get to this more about what's happening right now, food was not on people's minds as a political issue, if you will.

Jared I think there's a lot to unpack there and I think you, you brought up some really interesting talking points. The one that I really wanted to focus on first was, you referenced the collapse in 2008 with the "Titans of the financial industry were brought to their knees" is the phrase that you used, and I think what we're seeing is something very similar. When it comes to infrastructure, our assumptions around infrastructure, convenience and what works, has been just completely put up in the air. I know internally at our team, we've talked a lot about, how do we be sources of good and driving this new future forward out of this. We're honestly left there saying "we don't know what's going to change," the response to this whole crisis is going to be unbelievable. So what, from your perspective of working with the large scale clients and being an investment law through the last financial crisis has prepared you? What are some of those similarities that you start to see? How does that actually apply to coming out of this and creating a world for the better?

Ran Well, that's the trillion dollar question, but I'm not sure. What I look at this time is it's ultimately, there is a lot of talk about what's the world gonna look like? Ultimately, the world is going to look like what we make it to be. I think that's the key thing to understand. There's a reshuffling of the deck right now but it's not preordained where it's all going to land. I always go back to this, there's people often are very skeptical when I say, we can create a system that's healthier. One of my core goals with Fresh City is to create, what I essentially think of as an alternative food system, in terms of where we source, how we process it, how we package it, how we sell it, and how we treat it the people who work with us.

The reason I want to do that is just so people have a sense of it's possible. This little, you know, ramshackle outfit in Toronto is doing it, why can't Costco do it? Why can't Walmart do it? Why can't it be done at large? So going back to your question, I think there's a lot of different realities that can emerge from this pandemic. But it's up to us to shape that. You can bet that there's a lot of people in the status quo that are trying to shape it in a way that's advantageous to them. I'll give you a small example. You might've heard of a lot of these meat plant closings in the U S and in Canada. In the US, I think they're the largest meat processor, Tyson foods. He put out an ad in the New York times, that in some ways could have been looked at as a public service announcement. Basically saying, you know what public, we're being forced to close, this is going to impact the availability of meat on your shelves, and you should be really worried. Really what it was is a lobbying campaign to the federal government that ended up being successful with president Trump announcing that meat plants have to go back operational, regardless of if they have COVID outbreaks and whatnot.

That's to me an example of the status quo saying, you know what, actually the problem here is not that, we've concentrated production in this plant and we have all these people working shoulder to shoulder, and meats too cheap. It's that we need to force our workers to go back to work.

Is that going to win out? Is that guy who took out an ad in the New York Times and successfully lobbied the president to force these plants to reopen. Is he going to win out? Is it the vision of people like me? I'm part of, I like to think, a part of a very broad movement of a more decentralized or deindustrialized food system the way to go.

A lot of times, the protectors of the status quo will make all these alarmist statements about how we're all gonna go hungry if we don't do things their way. The reality of it is, our consumption of meat today is actually the unsustainable part, not trying to do it differently on a more regional or local scale, whether it's meat production or processing.

To answer your question, I don't know what the answer is going to be when we come out of this? I know what we're, I personally, as a company as a whole, is working toward. I think it is in our hands and it's our moment where change is more possible, certainly on the food side in our lifetime really. For anybody who's interested in making change, now is the time to roll up your sleeve and advocate for it.

Jared I agree. I agree. And speaking of the status quo, there's nothing status quo about starting a commercial city farm. I'm sure the first question you get asked when you talk about what you do is why the city? I think you touched on an interesting point there about immersing people near where their food is made and make it a little bit more visible. But if the goal is education and the rise of documentation and multimedia is coming, is there not an argument to be made that you could just be making a whole bunch of content about the farming process and try to distribute it digitally?

Talk to me about the decision to really be boots on the ground in the middle of the city.

Ran Oh, totally. I guess at core, I think any entrepreneur will tell you that at the end of the day, you have this idea that just starts dogging you. Right. And, at least in my case, I just had to do it. That's was the reality of it. I could rationalize it in any different way. I just thought a magical, I thought like, wow, in the city, if you can like take the subway and go to the farm and like, you know, grab your stuff. But ultimately, my sense of it was this was this: we're going into a world where there's obviously a lot of different content out there and it can be presented on different platforms in different ways. But I think, and this is probably the kernel of the idea, is that nothing beats that kind of connection to the land, that primal connection to the land. Whether it's through evolutionary biology and what we're used to as a species. This idea of living in an asphalt and concrete is fairly new.

I do think, and I have seen it again and again, maybe I'm projecting who knows, but when people come to the farm, it's a different kind of relationship. It helps start them on a path and a different kind of relationship with food that I think is really hard to mimic. Maybe one day with really interesting virtual reality, but the taste, the smells, the textures, the totality of it is very hard to convey just through various media. To your point, what I do think though the farm in the city does do, is it in my mind, the importance of it is it bridges the chasim between eater and maker. You look in the 1930s, one and three of us live in a farm. Fast forward to today, it's like one in a hundred or something like that. And I don't say that in a romantic sense. I don't think one in three of us should be farming because that wasn't a fun existence either.

But I do think we lost something by having most of us not have any sense of what farming is like. We certainly have lost the sense of what implications that has on humans who are farming and certainly the environmental parts of it. So in my mind, there was just this primal kernel there that if I could get people to the farm. We've just signed a lease actually for a 20 year lease at Downsview for bigger plot of land where we can really activate it in ways that make it a destination for people who are not just looking to come to a farm per se; who are looking to have a wedding say in a park/farm setting. Who are looking to do a corporate retreat at an interesting place. So I'm a big believer in immersing people in the farm in ways that is accessible to them. Ultimately, can get them thinking about food, no matter if they're a hardcore vegan and they want to come volunteer on the farm, or work on the farm, or they just want to take a stroll through the farm. and maybe see what a kale plant looks like in the flesh for the first time.

Jared That's great. That's great,

Ran I don't know if that answers your question, but that's the kernel of the idea, behind why we farm with the

Jared city.

I think it it's really interesting, and when I hear you say it, it sounds great, but it also sounds really hard.

I'm curious to know what are some of the most common misconceptions about city farming?

Ran Wow. So let me tell you this. So I wouldn't have started it had I known how hard it was, whether it's the farming part or now the retail part. Food is tough from any part of the value chain that you look at.

I think one of the big misconceptions about urban farming, probably the biggest one is that it's somehow paradoxical, or that it shouldn't happen in the city because farming happens out there. You know, when you zip along the 401 or the 400 and you see farm land around you. But actually, certainly in historical terms, a lot of food production happened in the city. And before the advent of the car, there was a really good reason for that. Just because a) food costs much more to transport into the city, so you wanted to grow it as quick as close to the city, if not in the city, if you could. And b) there was a lot of horse shit that actually provided really good compost for growth.

So historically, there was a really good reason for it. And then even as late as, World War II, something like 50% of our produce needs were met by big victory gardens and gardens in the city, and that makes complete sense. If you think of how much it costs, and even as late as World War II, to transport food, to refrigerate food, it just made sense to have the tomato in the backyard you could just pluck and eat for dinner that day, rather than having to bring it in from Mexico. I think in this day and age it still makes sense, I'll be it for different reasons. I've always said, unlike some people, I think on the urban farming movement, if you will, the main reason you farm in the city is not for food security. It's not because you're going to grow 50% of your food in your backyard anymore because a lot of us don't have backyards, or we're too busy to farm enough to feed ourselves. But it's still a very natural place because it has all these other benefits to it.

If you think of the land that we have a Downsview that we lease out from the federal government it's about two acres. On that two acres, we're able to create a three or four full time jobs. We're able to take two acres of lawn that previously needed to be mowed, so it's cheaper now for the federal government to operate that park. There's less carbon emissions from mowing it. There's more carbon capture happening there because it's soil is full of organic matter and carbon. And it's obviously an engagement platform and education platform for anything from school trips that come there, to the tours that we host, to the events that we have there. In my mind, we're a specific type of urbon farm, we're commercial farm. But whether it's a community garden or balcony gardening, farming in the city has so many advantages that I'm always surprised it doesn't happen more. We work with along a lot larger nonprofits who use urban farms as a platform, whether it's community building, whether it's leadership training, whether it's therapies of various kinds. It's just a great platform for all sorts of wins if you will.

Jared I think when you lay it all out like that, it makes so much sense despite the difficulty of actually making it happen. Another thing, I recently read a medium article that you wrote talking about six food projects the government should start funding tomorrow. And when I read through that, I went, yes this makes an incredible amount of sense as well. Do you mind speaking on some of those points that you had talked about in that article.

Ran Yeah, of course. Sorry, I'm just having a quick bite here.

So if you step back, I think the question for me is always, what can we do that's sustainable, ecologically, financially, et cetera. And these are the stimulus funding, if you will, some project that can happen pretty quickly. What can have impact right awa? I've always been surprised at how.much we can do as a society that's actually not that interventionists. I have a lot of faith in government. By necessity I think that government needs to do very well, but I think in many cases, government just needs to act as an enabler. So one of the thing I think in the wake of COVID that I've asked the opportunity for is for urban farming to take place at places like schools. We do see here and there some schools with gardens, but the main issue there is that there's seasonality obviously. We're farming certainly in Canada and a good chunk of the growing season is outside of the school year.

So why not have a greenhouse installed in every school? Or every school that wants to at the very least so that kids can learn how to grow year around. One of the things that I've always been very pleasantly surprised at by the schools that come visit us at Downsview, our farm there is that, you get the sense that kids who grew with the internet, with iPads, and all these things that I didn't have growing up, my sense was always they'd come to the farm and just be bored stiff because it's not as shiny. It's not as interesting. I've actually found the opposite is true where a lot of these kids, they're very engaged with what's happening at the farm, and they're very interested in the five senses element of it that they don't get necessarily through screen time or through other elements of their education.

So I'm a big believer that growing in food can be a huge benefit to the school as a platform for teaching about nutrition, for teaching about patience, like this whole idea that you reap, what you sow, for physical activity.

So schools is one thing that I think we can do start doing tomorrow and start building greenhouses, having kind of action green teams, if you will build out. A garden with a greenhouse in every school, across Canada. And similarly the biggest tragedy to emerge from this crisis is longterm care homes where most of the deaths have happened. I think there is a place, and these are all themes that have been talked about in academic circles or in a couple of leading institutions in Canada and the US, how great it would be to have urban farming greenhouses in particular, in a lot of health care settings.

So whether it's longterm care homes, whether it's hospitals, rehab centers. There's just a big place for food growing in a lot of those settings that is currently under recognized. And the tragedy of it is it's so cheap. It is so cheap compared to a lot of the other things that we do medically, right.

CAMH downtown here in Toronto has a greenhouse that actually goes back, I believe to the early 19 hundreds and has been functioning throughout that whole time. Initially it was meant to actually grow food, now it's more of a part of their therapeutic tool.

Again, we often look at like shiny new technologies, which obviously has a role to play. But sometimes just having an hour or two a week being able to get your hands dirty, can make all the difference for someone's mental health. So it was a couple of examples that I think would be very low cost, very quick to implement, and just have a huge, huge benefit for longterm care homes and schools for example.

Jared I mean, I'm fortunate. I live just North of the city and so I have a little bit of space at my backyard, and I have a couple raised garden beds and we actually have a community garden just across in the park, across the street from us. I am fortunate to be able to get my hands dirty a couple hours a week and experiment that and I can definitely attest to that.

Now, there are many people who don't necessarily have the space or the resources to be able to do that. What sort of opportunities are available to people who do want to give this a shot in a private capacity.

Ran It's interesting, you know, it can run the gamut. I'm a firm believer that each Canadian should have the rights to farm and to have enough land to grow enough food for themselves, if they so choose, which is actually not a lot of space. If you actually read about it, you need very few, maybe like a hundred square feet or something to grow enough produce for yourself if you're farming intensively.

I think the government has a big role to play here. We've historically provided a lot of infrastructure to industry and to people, whether it's roads, whether it's a right of ways, whether it's railway passages in the heart of urban centers. So I think a big part of it is on government, to all three levels, or to free up some land urban dwellers who don't have it themselves at a private capacity, to have access to that right. That said, until that right is realized and that day comes, I think you have a lot of options as an individual. So whether it's farming, even in a limited capacity where you are, if you have a balcony, if you have a window sill, there are some tools online now to match up people who have backyards with people who want to farm them. So, so that's another option.

Community gardens are an option. I'll be it a limited one in Toronto right now. There's the long waiting lists. If you really want to kind of get your hands dirty and learn about farming in a more commercial sense, you can intern at any number of organic farms and other farms across Canada, or across the world for that matter. Certainly in Southern Ontario, there's a robust community of farms that have insurance coming in every growing season. I think it depends partly on what your goals are, but I think no matter where you're situated, I would say you could start with something. But ideally our governments collectively empower us to do it in a broader scale.

Jared That's great.

I wanted to talk a bit more about Fresh City Farms. I believe it was just last month you open your second grocery store. Congrats on that, by the way.

Ran Thank you.

Jared I'm curious to know how you're planning to scale because there's such limited real estate in the city, as you mentioned, and you kind of hinted at signing a new lease on a large plot of land. I'm sure there's a lot of different ideas there, but is the plan also to grow the grocery side business? I'd love to hear about that.

Ran Yeah, and then maybe I could talk a bit about our trajectory. When we started, we sold mostly what we grew at Downsview and partnered with a few other farms to grow fruit and other things that we didn't grow. Over the years, and it kind of goes with my philosophy that we're not trying to, the idea behind Fresh City is not to say that everything we sell is grown in the city. It's really to get people thinking about food. So in that spirit, we've actually partnered with a lot of farmers over the years that share our values in terms of sustainable farming, organic farming, circular economy where possible. So we've grown along those lines.

At this point, I'd say the trajectory of our retail business is not necessarily tied to how much we can produce in the city, but we have for many years, and this lease I'm talking about that we just signed is a culmination of about nine years of like cajoling and lobbying and getting an eviction notice, and all sorts of stuff, until we finally got this lead that, at least from the federal government. So, on the Fresh City at large, we are committed to growing in the GTA both in the online channel, so delivery to people's homes as well as bricks and mortar.

We just launched, as you said, our store at Bay and Gerard in late March. So we're in the midst of all this madness. Yeah, it was prescheduled so we decided to go ahead with it. The whole team felt they could do it and so the key for us, as we scale is, and this has always been the case, is we want to grow as big as we can, as long as we can stay true to our underlying values.

So, for us, we've said we've seen this quite a bit with companies that in the beginning, are sourcing locally or sourcing organically. As they grow, that commitment is diluted and they start sourcing organic when they can, or if they can, or if the price permits and all these cabinets that render it convenient eventually. My goal was always to create a business where every dollar of revenue extra that we earn is a dollar of revenue that I sincerely believe is making the world a better place.

Again, really just getting down to the crux of it. So if it means we increased the acreage of organic production in Canada. If it means that we are minimizing the use of disposable packaging. If it means that we're delivering more, which means net carbon savings because not all these people are driving separately to pick up their groceries, but we're delivering it as part of an optimized route. All these kinds of initiatives we're taking to move our food system forward. As long as I felt comfortable with that, I'm comfortable scaling. I've never been of the adage that we should remain small. I just don't think we should get big for the sake of getting big. We should get big if we feel like we're continuing to have an impact.

Jared That's great.

I want to respect your time so I got one more question before you go, and it's something that we at our team have been really thinking about over the last little while. We entered a hackathon that was in partnership with the city of Innisfil and the topic that we decided to really kind of put our brains around were local farms and how they're going to handle with this. As many of the local farms rely on supplying restaurants that are now closed or farmer's markets that are likely not going to be open either, there's a lot of fear and nerves around this. I imagine some of the large scale farmers, that are counter to a lot of what you're talking about and what you believe, are kind of licking their lips at the thought that this could kind of push away some of this. So how can we as consumers, or how can small independent farms really be trying to come out this on the other side and growing and continuing such a strong movement that I think has been really picking up steam over the last several years.

Ran I think as a consumer, you obviously have choices to make. You can choose where you spend your next dollar. Buying from a farmer directly, like a CSA, or farmer's market, or that restaurant that actually sources locally, I think is one powerful thing to do.

But I will say again, if I think of Fresh City and what I'm trying to do with this company, I don't think our problems are going to be solved by individual people making better choices. I do think that as a consumer that's part of the mix. But I think the more powerful thing is just think of whatever power that you see out there. I joke about this, whether it's like, if you're a seven years old and for you power, the person who has the most control over your life is your parents and they're the ones sourcing your food.You talk to your parents about where they're sourcing their food and you urge them to source it somewhere differently. And so whether it's your boss, or whether it's your MP, or whether it's your counselor, wherever you see power reside, encourage it to make better choices. Obviously there's a whole spectrum there, of powers centers you can engage with. It could be your grocery store manager. Your local grocery store manager say, "Hey, I want to see more." "Why am I not seeing any carrots from the whole Marsh? We live two seconds from it." "Why is all the carrots coming from California?" That is it to me at the crux of it because there isn't people, you know, I think there's a sense of like, you know, if the federal government passes this statute, this will solve everything, and it's not. There's no silver bullet to solving the food problem if you will. I think it's going to take a lot of different steps, but at the crux of it is, it's challenging the status quo wherever it resides.

Jared That's great, I really appreciate that. And before we let you go, I'd love to give you the opportunity to make some sort of plug or tell our listeners to check you out somewhere.

Ran Oh, sure. Fresh City, were available online for delivery throughout the GTA, free delivery. You can get your full assortment of groceries starting with organic produce, to a hundred percent grass fed and certified organic beef, to the widest selection of organic prepared foods in the province. As far as I know, if not Canada. Also, we have eight stores in total in the GTA, two under the Fresh City banner, out on Ossington street and at Bay and Gerard in the hospital district. Two healthy butcher stores, one down on Queen West, and one up on Eglinton Avenue, as well as four smaller Mable's Bakery locations scattered throughout the downtown west end of Toronto. We also have our farm at Downsview park, which if all goes well, depending on what the public health authorities tell us to, hopefully we can still run our you pick program where you could come in and pick your own kale, and tomatoes, and cucumbers during the summer so, watch out for that. And that's right at Keele and Sheppard at Downsview park.

Jared Awesome. Well, that's great. I really appreciate the conversation, man.

Ran No, not a problem. Thank you for reaching out and thanks for the great questions.

Jared No worries.

In our next episode, I'm going to be speaking with Adrienne Rand. Adrienne is the VP of Strategy at Public Inc. an agency that specializes in helping brands create profits with purpose. This episode is going to focus on businesses and how they can use the power of marketing, advertisement, and messaging for good.

You can find all the links for everything discussed in this episode, as well as the transcripts for every episode on our website thepossiblenow.com. Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions or comments that you have on Twitter or Instagram at the handle @thepossiblenow.