A huge garden The Savoura greenhouses are huge indoor gardens (19 hectares) that provides the perfect environment to grow tomatoes of outstanding taste and aroma. Every day, a large team of passionate, dedicated specialists takes care of the 508,000 plants that produce a crop of over 15,000 tons of tomatoes annually. The Natural Way Savoura chooses sustainable and environmentally friendly cultivation methods: • our agrologists carefully select non-genetically modified tomato varieties stemming from natural crossbreeding only (no GMOs). • our insect control methods (yes, they’re in the greenhouse, just like in nature) are organic and integrated. The greenhouse whitefly or Trialeurode vaporarium is the greenhouse’s number one enemy. To control this insect in the greenhouse, we introduced a variety of small wasps (Encarsia formosa), a natural predator of the greenhouse whitefly. • to complete the team, a variety of bees (Bombus impatiens) busily work at pollinating the plants in order to fertilize the Savoura tomatoes naturally. • and our culture media are completely organic. Impact of Technology on Greenhouse Crops Greenhouse vegetable production at Savoura provides first-quality tomato crops all year round. Technology is mainly responsible for this extensive availability. The sun provides most of the required light. During the cold season, when this proves insufficient, grow lights are added. The greenhouse supervisors are assisted by computers in maintaining an ideal plant-growing environment. We test alternative nature-friendly cultivation methods, on an ongoing basis, at the experimental greenhouse. Partnerships with agrologists and other specialists help Savoura to continuously make improvements to our organic insect control methods and to achieve our main objective: producing greenhouse tomatoes that are as fresh and tasty as garden-ripened specimens. A unique taste The taste comes out on top is our slogan. And that terrific taste is not blind luck: we undertook many studies at each stage of growth in order to deliver the unique taste that tells you you're eating a Savoura tomato. By doing so, we've been able to discover and control several factors that contribute to exceptional taste. Firstly, selecting the appropriate variety is very important, and many years of study have helped us find the unique, great tasting cultivars that Quebeckers like best. But simply planting the right variety is not enough to guarantee the quality for which we're justly renowned. The way the plants are treated and the environment in which they're grown are also important. That's why we undertook a three-year study in collaboration with Agriculture Canada in order to determine the ideal climate, temperature, humidity etc. for unforgettable greenhouse tomatoes. We're also careful to get just the right sugar content to balance and optimize our tomatoes’ subtle flavours. And, of course, allowing our tomatoes to ripen on the vine — just like nature intended — helps ensure you get the most out of all our trouble in producing delectable Savoura tomatoes. Since we took care to develop our greenhouses close to the markets, we can pick them at their peak and you can eat them fresh off the vine. And now that we've produced this popular tomato, we haven't stopped to congratulate ourselves: we keep on testing and refining our tomatoes so that whenever people say “Savoura” they're thinking “Superb!”