In the subarctic town of Churchill, Manitoba–unreachable by paved roads and best known for its population of polar bears–a head of romaine lettuce can cost as much as $8 without subsidies. Shipments of produce can take weeks from distant farms, and when vegetables arrive, it’s an event . But the town will soon have another option: a shipping container farm growing greens on site.

A 40-foot shipping container was repurposed into a hydroponic greenhouse in Spokane, Washington, then shipped to Montreal, where a cargo ship has taken it through the St. Lawrence River, around the coast of Newfoundland, and is now traveling through the Hudson Bay. When the delivery arrives on October 19, Churchill will be the seventh community in the Far North to begin using this type of farm, called the Arctic Growing System.

“The impetus for the whole project was the high cost of food and lack of opportunities for employment in Inuit communities,” says Corey Ellis, cofounder and CEO of The Growcer, the startup that makes the shipping container farms and works with the small communities that operate the farms.

The company was born out of a project called the Northern Innovation Hub, which aims to find solutions to local problems like food security, housing, and employment. Ellis and others worked with remote communities to brainstorm potential solutions, and landed on local food production as a way both to spur economic development and improve health.

Right now, many people in the area struggle to afford food. Even when grocery stores get subsidies from the Canadian government to offset high produce prices, the cost of shipping extremely long distances and the rates of spoilage on the journey means fruits and vegetables are still quite expensive. That cost means that consumers are more likely to pick unhealthy packaged foods, which have pushed up the rate of diabetes.

And the fresh options that do make it often aren’t very appealing. “If you’re in a community in Northern Canada where it already takes a week for produce to get to an urban center, and another week or two for it to fly to three different communities and kind of bunny hop over to yours, everything that was fresh is no longer really edible,” Ellis says.

The container farms can also create new jobs. “I think they saw an opportunity: Hey, why are we spending money down south to buy food when we could keep it in our community and pay someone local to harvest it?” he says.