Building A Rocketship As We Fly it

Today, CultivatR celebrates its First Birthday. A year ago today, we pushed the button that launched our first version of our site. We had five producers and about 20 different products. We now have over 650 products and work with over 50 Alberta Farmers, Ranchers, and Food Artisans.

It was been one busy and wild year for us. One of our customers told us we are literally building the plane while we’re flying it… but it feels more like a rocketship to us.

We hired our first team member in January, and we weren’t sure if we would have enough work to keep them busy full time. Our team is now 12 and we are about to hire 4 more people. Last June, we signed our first lease, unsure how we were going to pay rent each month and this month we just moved into a facility that is triple the size.

When we first started, our vision was simple - to build a platform that connects local farmers, ranchers and food artisans to customers. We wanted to make it easier for our producers to focus on what they love… creating exceptional food. We also wanted to make it easy for people to have access to amazing local food.

We’re so thrilled to see our vision come together. Seeing our local farmers, ranchers and food artisans do well and hearing how thankful our customers are to have access to their amazing local food makes it all worth it.

To our producers:

Thank you for doing what you do! Fighting through the hard times to stick to your beliefs and raising, growing or making exceptional product, in ways that nourish us and actually help our environment. We are so grateful to all of you for your patience, flexibility, the midnight deliveries, and understanding that together we can build something amazing.

To our customers:

There wouldn’t be a CultivatR without you. We are forever grateful to each and everyone of you, for helping this vision come to life. Thank you for taking a chance on us, for sticking with us when we got orders wrong, fighting through our slow website, and patience when deliveries were late. To customers who send us your kind words, your compliments, your feedback, and even complaints, please keep them coming. Our staff meetings start with these successes and opportunities and we are continuously striving each day to make things better.

By simply eating locally, we have been able to do some pretty amazing things this year:

• Creation of 16 jobs, that pay above living wage standards and provide a safe work environment. 

   

• Fair prices paid to producers

   

• Proved we can eat Alberta Food all year round

   

• Exponential economic benefits to the Alberta Economy in the millions

This just shows how by making a small change to eat locally, we can have a huge impact. By taking care of each other and supporting our neighbours we can bring Alberta back.

This year was just the start, we can’t wait to show you what we have planned for next year as we start to build our predictive agriculture platform.

Thank you for Supporting Local Farmers, Ranchers, and Food Artisans.

Dan and the Entire CultivatR Team