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.
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 buyers
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