Hey CFIN Community!
We just announced funding for four food innovation projects that are tackling food access, safety, and sustainability. The projects were funded through our 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.
If you want more info -- including quotes from all four winners as well as Minister Champagne and CFIN CEO @Joe Lake -- you can check out the press release.
The next round of Innovation Booster funding is now open and applications are due by September 12, 2022. The intake will focus on projects addressing Food Ecosystem Sustainability.
Congrats to all four winning projects!