What Happens to the Food That Never Makes It to the Store?

from Growing the Future · host Craig McIntosh, Carissa Campeo, Dan Aberhart

Roughly 60 percent of the food grown in Canada is wasted, and a lot of it never had anything wrong with it. Carrots and cucumbers get cut into fragments for grocery platters. Produce gets culled because it doesn't fit a store's mold, not because it isn't edible. Craig and Carissa, co-founders of Trendi, built a mobile processing unit that goes straight to the farm and turns that excess into a shelf-stable product before it ever becomes waste. Trendi isn't a waste management company. It stops waste before it happens. What's Inside - Why 60 percent of Canada's food supply is wasted, and how that number connects to food insecurity affecting 4 million Canadians - How the BioTrim mobile unit processes excess crops onsite into BioFlakes, shelf-stable at roughly 1/20th the original size, retaining 97 percent of nutrient density - Why processing at the farm beats processing at a distant plant, and what a month in a grocery store fridge actually costs a vegetable's nutrient value -The zero-cost, profit-share model that gives farmers a new revenue stream instead of a bill -The "feed people first, animals second, soil third" philosophy behind every batch that comes through the machine - What the Trendi circular economy app is being built to connect: farms, upcyclers, and buyersConnect with Growing the Future Website: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

Episode metadata supplied by the publisher feed · Published Jul 2, 2021

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What this episode covers

Craig and Carissa, co-founders of Trendi, explain how their mobile BioTrim unit processes excess and cosmetically rejected crops directly on the farm into a shelf-stable product that retains roughly 97 percent of its original nutrient density. They walk through the zero-cost, profit-share model that gives farmers a new revenue stream, the scale of Canada's food waste problem, and the food-people-animals-soil priority that shapes where every batch ends up. Both come to the business from hospitality and culinary backgrounds, not agriculture, which shapes how they talk about the problem.