News Release

Canadian Food Innovation Network Invests $338k in Four Food Sector Projects

Bc, Alberta, and Ontario Innovation Booster Recipents Are Developing Innovative Solutions to Improve Food Safety and Sustainability

GUELPH, ON, Under Embargo until August 3, 2022The Canadian Food Innovation Network (CFIN) has announced an investment of $338,000 into four projects valued at nearly $700,000 through the organization’s Innovation Booster program

The Innovation Booster funding recipients are:

Project Title: From purees to powders: Using rescued foods for healthy soups

Project Lead: Trendi Tech Inc. (Burnaby, BC)

Description: This project will demonstrate new avenues for repurposing ingredients through the evolution of The Smoothie Machine -- a healthy and automated vending solution that will offer fresh fruit smoothies and hot soup options to create a full circle economy utilizing upcycled fruits and vegetables. 

Benefit to Canadians: Reducing food waste through upcycling improves access to more sustainable and local food options for Canadian businesses and consumers.

Project Title: Nutrimeals Personalized Nutrition Platform -- Beta Prototype Development

Project Lead: Nutrimeals (Calgary, Alberta)

Description: This project will advance the competitiveness of Canada’s food business by developing a platform which leverages AI to provide healthy, ready-to-eat meals that are customized to each customer’s dietary needs. By digitizing the e-commerce platform and logistics model, Nutrimeals will be able to seamlessly deliver hyper localized fulfillment across Canada.

Benefit to Canadians: Improving and expanding access to precision nutrition and ready-to-eat meals ensures Canadians can enjoy a more accessible and personalized approach to their diet.

Project Title: Automated Solid State Fermentation Incubator for Canadian pulse-based Tempeh products

Project Lead: Henry's Tempeh (Kitchener, ON)

Description: This project seeks to fully develop an automated turn-key tempeh incubator system that can easily scale to produce industrial quantities of tempeh, with a focus on fermenting Canadian pulses into tempeh products.

Benefit to Canadians: This innovation highlights how automation can improve utilization and preservation of important Canadian crops through the conversion into value added nutritious food products that could not occur otherwise.

Project Title: BioTagging grain for transformative digitization and traceability in commodity food supply chains

Project Lead: Index Biosystems Inc. (Toronto, ON) 

Description: Index Biosystems Inc. uses biotechnology to turn baker’s yeast into microscopic barcodes called BioTags, which create a secure link between a product and its supply chain data. In this pilot project, Index is partnering with industry to optimize an automated BioTag application system to tag and trace grain throughout the supply chain.

Benefit to Canadians: More effective and accurate supply chain tracking provides Canadians with greater confidence about their food and its journey while enhancing food safety, traceability and sustainability across the food value chain.

The Innovation Booster, which is administered by CFIN and supported by the Government of Canada’s Strategic Innovation Fund, provides flexible and rapid support to Small or Medium Enterprises (SMEs) as they address food innovation challenges or technical hurdles that have created barriers to achieving their commercialization goals. 

CFIN received 27 applications from organizations based in 16 cities across Canada including Port Coquitlam, Calgary, Edmonton, Kitchener, Quebec City, and Halifax. 

The next round of Innovation Booster funding opens July 20, 2022, and applications are due by September 12, 2022. The intake will focus on projects addressing Food Ecosystem Sustainability, which includes development and innovation across these areas:

  • food waste reduction
  • higher value recovery
  • circularity and upcycling
  • green and smart packaging
  • more efficient use of inputs including energy, water and carbon

Applicants must be members of the Canadian Food Innovation Network. Membership is free and open to anyone in the Canadian food sector

QUOTES

“The CFIN team is energized by innovative activity we’re seeing nationally as demonstrated in the applications received for the booster. This further validates the need to support and invest into Canadian food innovation and continue to catalyze activity in the food sector. These four winning projects are demonstrating impactful solutions that will reduce food waste, improve food safety, and digitize our supply chains, which will provide direct benefits for companies and consumers coast-to-coast.”

– Joseph Lake

CEO, Canadian Food Innovation Network

“Canada has endless potential in the food innovation space, and we’re tapping into this potential like never before thanks to the work of the Canadian Food Innovation Network—a dynamic and collaborative nationwide network of businesses and innovators. The funding announced today will help drive innovation and give Canadian companies a leading edge in the global food sector.”

– The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry

FUNDING RECIPIENT QUOTES

“The funding from CFIN means we can jump start the design for a hot soup kiosk, which will use our own freeze-dried products. While making it easy for people to get nutritious food on the fly, we will begin to create a circular economy.” -- Craig McIntosh, CEO at Trendi Tech Inc. 

“We are passionate about making healthy eating accessible. We are eager to work with CFIN and see our project come to life. The funding through will get us one step closer to helping Canadians live a healthier lifestyle.” -- Samuel Hale, Co-Founder at Nutrimeals

"The funding from CFIN will accelerate our R&D around non soy fermentation and developing a smart fermentation system. This will allow us to get to market faster and scale with greater efficiency.” -- Jason Jurchuk, President at Henry's Tempeh

“Industry has struggled to secure our supply chains because we’ve had no way to authenticate bulk and commodity products, such as grains. With BioTags, for the first time in history, we can authenticate individual grains at commodity scale. We can give granular identity to anything on the planet - a passport for every grain. CFIN’s support allows us to demonstrate our technology at commodity scale and is a critical step towards the implementation of BioTags into Canada’s commodity supply chains.” -- Michael Borg, Founder and CEO at Index BioSystems

ABOUT THE CANADIAN FOOD INNOVATION NETWORK

The Canadian Food Innovation Network (CFIN) is a national non-profit, member-based organization that’s stimulating transformative and transferrable innovation across the Canadian food sector. We connect the Canadian food ecosystem to fresh insights, ideas, and technologies to elevate their business and increase their innovation capacity. You can become a CFIN member (for free!) in less than five minutes. 

RELAVENT LINKS

Innovation Booster program:

https://www.cfin-rcia.ca/booster-propulseur

CFIN Membership:

https://www.cfin-rcia.ca/join-cfin

NOTE TO MEDIA

For more information, please contact Canadian Food Innovation Network (CFIN)

Saskia Brussaard, Crave PR, saskia@cravepr.com.

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