What would it take to create the first truly circular food economy? In Southwestern Ontario, Canada, the small city of Guelph and the surrounding county of Wellington have set themselves the goal of finding out, with promising results.
What do a fillet of breaded steelhead trout, a side of chips, and a pint of pale ale have in common?
Aside from being served in the same restaurant – the Wooly Pub, in Guelph, these three items are more connected than you might think.
Together they represent one of the world’s first off-farm circular meals, created entirely from local food waste byproducts.
The circular meal is part of the Re(PURPOSE) project, which saw seven local businesses and a team of food sustainability experts come together to demonstrate how circular principles could be used to repurpose food waste and produce a delicious meal at the same time.
The Wooly Pub’s offering began life at Wellington Brewery, from which spent grain was sent to Oreka Solutions to be used to feed its black soldier flies. Fly larvae was then sent to Izumi Aquaculture to provide feed for fish, whose waste became fertiliser for the potatoes at Smoyd Potato Farm. To complete the circle, spent grain from the brewery, along with spent yeast from Escarpment Labs, was used by local bakery The Grain Revolution to make the sourdough breading.
Re(PURPOSE) is just one project under the Our Food Future initiative, a pilot programme aiming to create Canada’s first circular food economy.
Run as a rural-urban partnership between Guelph and the surrounding county, Wellington, the programme is designed to completely reimagine the way we produce, distribute, sell, and consume food – beginning with how we think about waste.
The Circular Future
First conceptualised in 2019, Our Food Future was originally developed as a proposal for Canada’s Smart Cities Challenge, a competition in which municipalities from around the nation submit ideas to improve the lives of their residents through innovation, data and connected technology.
After deciding to throw their collective hat in the ring, the city and the county took the challenge to their community, consulting with more than 150 partners to find a common issue they could collaborate on.
According to Barbara Swartzentruber, executive director of Guelph’s Smart Cities Office and head of the programme, it didn’t take long before they landed on food as an area of interest.
“We have a very deep and rich history in agrifood here. We’re surrounded by a peri-urban area, with extremely rich farmland and a robust agriculture sector.”
Guelph is also home to a lively restaurant scene, as well as the University of Guelph – widely considered “Canada’s food university” – and a range of other small and medium business working in the food space.
The challenge for the city and the county was to find a way to unite its diverse set of stakeholders.
“We did a deep dive into what we thought the issues were within that sector and how we could continue to support and to grow it. And what we identified was that there were so many people working in the agrifood system from many different perspectives,” explains Barbara.
“The idea of the circular economy became the unifying approach we decided to use because it really brought people together.”
“Our vision was to reimagine a circular, regenerative, and sustainable food system – a system in which people had increased access to healthy, nutritious food; where food businesses and collaborations moved towards circular principles and purpose driven business; and where we identified ways in which we could not just design out waste but also valorise the waste that we are currently producing.”
Growing a Collective Vision
For its winning proposal, Guelph-Wellington received $10 million to turn its vision into a reality, a task it’s taken on with gusto.
Our Food Future is organised around three key workstreams: nutritious food, waste as a resource, and circular businesses and collaboration, under each of which sits a team of “researchers, post-secondary institutions, industry experts, not-for-profit organisations, business-accelerator organisations, and public-sector enterprises working together to co-design solutions and prototypes and projects”.
“It’s a big vision, but, when you take all those those three areas together – which actually hit all of the components of the the food value chain – you really start to see systems change,” says Barbara.
The goals for each workstream are deliberately bold. For example, Guelph-Wellington aims to create 50 new circular businesses and collaborations by 2025.
The Re(PURPOSE) project is just one initiative run under the Circular Opportunity Innovation Launchpad (COIL) platform, which aims to achieve this by encouraging circular businesses and social enterprises to collaborate on transformative circular solutions.
However, no stream is intended to function in isolation.
“For example, one of the things that our businesses workstream is working on is a co-lab opportunity where businesses and other partners within the supply chain, along with researchers, come together and identify ways in which they could change supply chains,” says Barbara.
“The Circular Opportunities Innovation Launchpad supports those businesses to do that … Finally, our waste work stream works with waste departments within the city and the county to identify ways to not just divert from landfill but to work with companies to learn how to upcycle and to open up new opportunities for their products.”
Guelph-Wellington’s other streams are equally ambitious in their aims, including achieving a “50% increase in access to affordable, nutritious food” and a “50% increase in economic benefit by unlocking the value of waste”.
Projects under these objectives include a collaboration between a juice company and partners to develop new applications for residues to use in dairy production, baking, cereals, and baby foods, as well as an artificial intelligence program that would provide households with real-time feedback on how effectively they are sorting their waste.
Broadening the Sphere of Influence
Despite the programme’s lofty goals, Barbara remains optimistic about Guelph-Wellington’s ability to meet them – thanks, in large part, to the wealth of community support behind the project.
“People got on board with the vision from the very beginning because they co-developed it, and they have continued to be passionate about it.”
“And more and more people keep showing up and wanting to get involved.”
So, what advice does Barbara have for other cities interested in following in Guelph-Wellington’s footsteps?
“Every city has a food system, and there’s always a place to start,” she says.
“But the first step is to understand where the pockets of energy around the food system are within the community – to talk to those stakeholders and to bring them together with stakeholders in other sectors.”
“That was one of the big learnings that we had. Once we brought people together across sectors, they would say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were working on that. That’s so interesting.’”
However, getting the right people in the room is just one part of the equation.
Barbara believes Guelph-Wellington’s success owes the most to its alternative approach to leadership.
“The idea that the city acts as a platform for innovation and a convener and a vision keeper, to some extent, is the model of the future. Government can’t do it alone. Community partners can’t do it alone. But when people work shoulder to shoulder, in a distributed leadership model, you really see significant change.”
All information expressed here was correct at the time of our interview. Since then, Barbara Swartzentruber has left the role of executive director at Guelph’s Smart Cities Office. She is currently a Senior Advisor at Generate Canada and Senior Fellow at the Smart Prosperity Institute working on national solutions for the future of food.