What does it take to grow Canadian strawberries twelve months a year — and win vendor of the year from Loblaw while you do it? On this episode, recorded live at the third annual Loblaw Supplier Summit, I sit down with Joe Spano, Managing Partner and Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Mucci Farms. Sixty years of family farming. One hundred and five acres of indoor produce. And a decades-long partnership with Loblaw that Joe says feels less like a contract and more like family. Plus, his advice for any supplier trying to break through.
Recorded live and in person at the third annual Loblaw Supplier Summit, this episode of The FEED powered by Loblaw brings you Joe Spano, Managing Partner and Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Mucci Farms — one of North America's most deeply vertically integrated greenhouse growers.
Mucci Farms began as a small family farm in Kingsville, Ontario in the early 1960s, founded by Tony and Gino Mucci in the Leamington-Kingsville corridor that remains Canada's greenhouse hot spot. Joe joined nearly 29 years ago as employee number one of the sales and marketing company, and with his partners took the business through succession starting in 1999. Today Mucci supplies Loblaw with vine crops — beefsteak tomatoes, tomatoes on the vine, cucumbers in every format, lettuce and strawberries — from a controlled-environment operation that now includes a 105-acre indoor strawberry facility producing Canadian berries nearly twelve months a year, pesticide free and herbicide free. That project began as a challenge Loblaw brought to Mucci around 2015.
Joe is candid about what constrains greenhouse growth in Canada: the capital barrier to entry keeps rising, and power, utilities, labour and the border are what keep him up at night. On affordability, he reframes the conversation from cost to value, pointing to sell-through approaching 100 percent on beefsteak tomatoes and to strawberries that arrive fresh enough that consumers eat every berry in the punnet — less waste on shelf and less waste at home.
He also pulls back the curtain on something rare in agriculture: an in-house marketing team with graphic designers and printers, operating like an ad agency inside the building, working alongside global seed companies to trial and launch new varieties. Looking ahead, Mucci is trialling blackberries and raspberries, pushing further into leafy greens, and testing Asian vegetables including Asian eggplant and bok choy.
On winning a Loblaw vendor of the year award against much larger competitors, Joe credits a relationship spanning nearly three decades that has never felt transactional — joint trips to Holland to research strawberry varieties, calls at 8 p.m. and 6 a.m., and category teams that feel like family. His advice to suppliers is refreshingly plain: be patient, think like a customer, and look at the business from the retailer's point of view.
Joe closes on the long game — a new long-term ownership partnership with Cox Farms of Atlanta, part of Cox Enterprises, and a hope that greenhouse growing is remembered as a cornerstone of accessible Canadian food supply.