Alvéole: Exporting Canadian urban beekeeping

Canadian companies looking to scale globally often face a fundamental question: How do you grow internationally while staying true to your values? For Alvéole, a Montreal-based sustainable urban beekeeping company, exporting early on became a way to expand impact—not just revenue.

In an episode of Export Development Canada’s (EDC) Export Impact Podcast, host Bruce Croxon speaks with Alex McLean, CEO and founder of Alvéole, about building a purpose-driven Canadian business that delivers urban biodiversity solutions while expanding across international markets.

Founded as a passion project in 2013, Alvéole has grown into an international exporter, operating in cities across North America and Europe. McLean shares how exporting early shaped the company’s growth and how EDC’s support helped them overcome the challenges of international expansion and scale with confidence.

Tune in to the Export Impact Podcast and find out how Alvéole overcame challenges to scale globally. Follow us on your favourite streaming platforms, so you never miss an episode. New episodes are released on the last Thursday of each month. 

For Alvéole, building a sustainable Canadian business with strong values didn’t start with a polished strategy or global ambition. It began much earlier, shaped by curiosity, experimentation and a long-standing interest in entrepreneurship.

“I started my first very unofficial business probably when I was 10 or 11 in elementary school and then a few more in high school and a few more after that,” recalls McLean. “Different things that were an indication that this was something that I wanted to do.”

The inspiration for urban beekeeping came later, through an unexpected family connection.

“When I was 16 years old, I stopped by my uncle’s farm in the middle of Manitoba and he was running a bee operation,” he explains. “I really fell in love with bees—with the relationship with ecosystems.”

This experience sparked a broader vision: To reintroduce biodiversity into urban environments where nature often feels disconnected from daily life. McLean saw an opportunity to rethink how cities interact with nature—and how businesses could be a vehicle for that change.

Today, Alvéole works with commercial real estate owners to install beehives and pollinators on rooftops to boost tenant engagement in urban biodiversity.

“The intention is to create cities that are more interesting for biodiversity and that will sustain different species,” McLean says. “We’re using real estate, which is a big portion of our built cities, but transforming it, so it actually has a positive impact on biodiversity instead of a negative impact.”

That commitment to sustainability and mission-led growth continues to shape how Alvéole operates and expands.

For Alvéole, going global was driven by the nature of its business model, rather than a desire for rapid expansion.

“When we started, we were in Montreal and that was kind of the beginning of the operation,” says McLean. “Probably in Year 2, it became clear that this would be a model where we’re in cities—densely populated cities.”

But the company’s growth couldn’t rely on simply expanding locally. To scale, it had to look beyond the domestic market and pursue growth beyond Canada.

That expansion didn’t come without challenges. Scaling internationally, while still refining the business model, made the early years particularly demanding.

“It was brutal to expand, to be honest, because we hadn’t properly sorted out the model when we started,” McLean admits.

Despite the difficulty, he was confident that long-term success depended on exporting early.

“I was clear that in order to be successful, it wasn’t going to happen in Canada necessarily,” he says. “It was going to be in the U.S. and ultimately, in Europe.”

As Alvéole expanded into new international markets, access to capital became increasingly important. EDC played a meaningful role in enabling the company’s global growth.

“It’s been mainly through help with capital and understanding that the expansion to new markets wasn’t the craziest thing,” McLean explains.

While lenders often encourage companies to stay local longer, EDC took a different approach.

“EDC never had that reflection,” McLean says. “It was always, ‘Go and do the big markets’—and that’s how a big company will be built.”

That confidence mattered as Alvéole pushed forward with financing international expansion earlier than many companies might attempt.

“We decided we wanted to go early and EDC was very supportive of that,” he says, noting that with access to EDC capital for exporters, the business could invest in new markets while maintaining focus on its long-term vision.

Although exporting is complex, McLean says it has strengthened his company and helped it build resilience by learning from diverse markets and planning for long-term growth.

“Export has helped us be stronger at home, as well,” he explains. “We get an understanding of how things are going in certain European countries, or how certain areas in the U.S. are doing.”

That global perspective allows the company to anticipate change and adapt its business strategy.

“If we’re looking into the future, we’re looking five, six, seven years down the road,” McLean says. “Getting the inputs from all these different areas gives us this better lens on how we need to evolve our products.”

For Canadian companies expanding internationally, building resilience often means understanding how different markets respond to uncertainty.

“Export for us has always been a very big part of how we see the future,” he says.

Scaling internationally brings operational and cultural complexity. Based on Alvéole’s experience in doing business abroad, McLean emphasizes that long-term success starts internally, with clear values shaping how a business grows across borders.

McLean shares five export tips for Canadian companies planning to grow internationally:

1. Clearly define your company values early
   “The advice I’d have is what seems like a bit of a soft and fuzzy exercise of codifying those values and saying, this is actually the stuff that we stand for and this is actually stuff that we don’t stand for”, he says. This creates a foundation that supports consistency.
   
   
2. Don’t skip the hard internal work
   For many Canadian exporters, the pressure to grow quickly can push internal work aside. McLean says Alvéole took the opposite approach.
   
   This early investment helped ensure the business was structurally ready to grow, rather than reactively adjusting as international complexity increased.
   
   
3. Values help you hire and scale across borders
   As teams grow across global markets, shared principles become increasingly important, maintaining cohesion across regions and cultures.
   
   “A common set of values has been really critical for us,” McLean says.
   
   
4. Hiring the wrong people can slow global growth
   International expansion often means hiring quickly—but McLean cautions that speed can come at a cost. “Nothing slows us down more than someone who’s not the right fit.”
   
   
5. Shared values keep global teams aligned
   “It’s part of our onboarding. It’s part of our screening,” he says, noting that values now guide Alvéole’s hiring, culture and compensation.

For Alvéole, building a purpose-driven business on an international scale required expanding beyond Canada early, investing in value-led growth and navigating global markets with a long-term vision.

By combining a clear mission with the right financing and growth strategy, Alvéole has set itself up for lasting, resilient success.

Ready to learn more? Listen to the Export Impact Podcast on edc.ca, or subscribe to Spotify, Apple or Amazon Music, and start turning your international business goals into reality.  

This content was created, in part, using generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI).