2025 Innovator Finalist: Corey Ellis, Growcer
October 23, 2025
Corey Ellis is one of three finalists in the Innovator category of the CEAg World Impact Awards. | Photo courtesy of Corey Ellis
Corey Ellis, co-founder and CEO of Growcer in Ottawa, Ontario, is one of three finalists in the Innovator category of theCEAg World Impact Awards. The Innovator Award recognizes an entrepreneur or leader who has pioneered and implemented a new tool, concept, or practice that has significant implications for CEA. This award recipient will be someone who has used their expertise to drive tangible improvements for growers, enhancing productivity, sustainability, and overall farm success.
Learn more about Ellis below, and watch CEAgWorld.com for more profiles of our finalists.
Corey Ellis was still a college student when he and classmate Alida Burke co-founded Growcer in 2016, aiming to provide affordable, fresh produce to remote regions of Canada. The two were members of a social entrepreneurship group called Enactus uOttawa at university, and a trip to Iqaluit, Nunavut—the country’s northernmost city, with a polar climate and a population of less than 10,000 people—sparked the concept.
In the beginning, Growcer focused on retrofitted shipping containers kitted out with hydroponic systems that could operate in extreme cold. Little by little, the operation evolved to develop its own purpose-built modular units with more advanced hydroponics and climate-control technology. Growcer’s customers include schools, indigenous organizations, institutions, and co-ops across all of Canada. And now, with the July 2025 purchase of Freight Farms’ assets after its unexpected bankruptcy announcement in April, Growcer has increased its customer base by over 500% and 29 countries.
In his role as CEO, Ellis has spearheaded a laser-focused, practical approach to innovation and growth. The operations have been bootstrapped from the start (with a few outside investors, Ellis says, who are long-term and strategic) and consistently profitable.
“When I think about innovation, it’s about helping our customers reduce risk and ultimately make better financial returns,” Ellis says. “Those are the only things that matter. There’s a lot of noise out there, so we’re the guinea pigs so our customers don’t have to be.”
For his efforts, Ellis was recognized in 2022 on Ottawa Business Journal’s Top Forty Under 40 list. He was also named one of the most influential Canadians in climate action by Maclean’s magazine in its 2024 edition of The Power List.
From the Lab Stage to Practical Application
Growcer sells modular systems to would-be farmers and then supports them with service, training, and ongoing operational models. “We’ll turn down customers who want to buy our product if we don’t think they’ll be successful,” Ellis says. “It’s just not worth the workload for us later. We ask a lot of questions to understand their business model because that’s a customer we want for life.”
Ellis is all about asking questions. Before he embarked on building Growcer’s first in-house designed systems around 2020, the team interviewed its first 20 customers for detailed feedback and pain points. More recently, he led a six-month trial on spinach after customers expressed disappointment with their yields.
“We chose specific cultivars and played around with environmental conditions, scheduling, timing, increasing germination,” Ellis says. “Germination in hydroponic spinach is always a challenge, especially when you get different seed batches.”
At the end of the trial, he says, “we approximately doubled the annual yield by changing the cultivation method. We designed some tools to make planting more efficient.”
He’s also brought the business to a point where it can offer financing for growers who want to try container farming but don’t have the capital to buy in all at once. “It’s essentially a rent-to-own model—we don’t charge anything upfront, you just pay three grand a month,” Ellis says.
He adds that he prefers to focus on a small number of innovation initiatives that will move the needle for growers relatively quickly. But he will make exceptions for projects with significant market impact, such as a strawberry growing system Growcer has been developing for four years now.
“We’re still not at a point where we have a commercially viable product,” he says. “It’s going quite well, and compared with some other indoor vertical farms, our yields are 30-50% higher. But it’s not enough. There’s a lot of work to do before we’ll sell it to a customer and have it be a profitable operation.”
Transparency and Collaboration
The Freight Farms acquisition has pushed Ellis and Growcer into the fast lane, but he maintains his focus on practical growth and selective problem-solving. “It’s a little challenging now because we’re definitely busier than we’d planned for. Over the coming months, it’ll be about whittling it down to that core list of what will amount to higher revenue, lower cost, or lower risk for growers.”
Along the way, Ellis has opened up on social media about the ups, downs, and question marks surrounding his company and vertical farming as a whole. He’s made his team’s spinach findings available to anyone who wants it and recently struck up a partnership with Growtainers, which will provide custom builds for specialty crop and research customers.
“I’d just like to challenge vertical farming to move beyond surface-level collaboration to do more data sharing,” he says. “And I don’t think we recognize how important policy is to our industry. We need to be collaborating on things like that—sharing best practices and organizing to have a unified voice on things that matter like zoning policies and technology adoption.
“We’re a tiny little industry, and we need to focus on growing the size of that market more than fighting for the pie that’s already there.”
The winners of the CEAg Impact Awards will be announced and honored live on stage at the kickoff ceremony for the CEAg World Conference and Expo on Nov. 20, 2025, in Durham, N.C.
To learn more and join us at the conference (growers attend free if registered by Oct. 31), visit CEAgWorld.com/events.
Kristin D. Zeit is the Content Lead for CEAg World. See all author stories here.