Ceres Solutions: Making mushrooms out of mash

BY ELIZABETH CHORNEY-BOOTH

One of the hottest topics in food supply circles right now is the question of what to do with the vast amount of food waste Canadians produce each year. While the waste that comes from overly ambitious vegetable purchases at home and leftover ingredients at restaurants is one thing, the massive amount of by-products from food and beverage production is also a huge part of the food waste equation.

Here in Alberta, our never-ending supply of craft beer creates mountains of brewers’ spent grain — that is, the oatmeal-like mash that remains after the brewing process. Recognizing the wastefulness of simply dumping tonnes of organic material still full of useful protein and fibre, breweries in Alberta tend to send a lot of their by-products off to farmers as cattle feed, while others have tried making it into bread or pizza dough.

When Ceres Solutions’ founder, Alex Villeneuve, was studying brewing at Olds College in 2015, he saw another, less obvious but more innovative possibility for all that spent grain. He started using it to grow mushrooms.

“I’ve always been excited about mushrooms,” Villeneuve says. “I’ve always loved finding and identifying them on hikes and thought they were fascinating. I saw all the grain coming out of the craft brewing process at Olds College and being sent off to compost or to the dump and I thought, ‘Wow, this is the best grain in the entire world and we're not utilizing it’.”

Villeneuve, who is originally from Edmonton, also studied culinary arts at NAIT, knew that mushrooms could flourish in the spent grain and took to experimenting with growing fungus in Zip-Loc bags stashed in his dorm room closet. Through the Olds College Centre for Innovation, he connected with funding bodies that helped him to develop a unique system that involves transforming the spent grain into a nutrient-rich mushroom substrate, sterilizing it to make sure that no competing fungi try to duke it out with his gourmet mushrooms, and then seeding it with a starter culture. The result is a hanging tube that sprouts a healthy crop of mushrooms, ready to be harvested and sold to local restaurants and markets.

“We’ve developed a system that does all of the major steps of mushroom processing in one automated vessel that requires very little input, and is really efficient in terms of square footage and utility usage,” Villeneuve says. “It’s much more efficient than existing or conventional methods.”

After spending several years longer than he intended at Olds College so he could focus on the project, a little over a year ago Villeneuve decided he was ready to take Ceres to the next level and moved his operation to a commercial demonstration facility in Crossfield, where his tubes of mushroom substrate hang in a series of shipping containers. Originally, his circular system involved upcycling the grains a second time as a protein-heavy cattle feed after the mushrooms are harvested, but provincial regulations posed some complications, so that is on the backburner for now. The current model sees the used substrate being fed to worms and then used in farmland as an ultra-rich soil.

Now that Ceres Solutions’ home base is no longer at an institution with a renowned brewing program and a steady supply of brewer’s spent grains, Villeneuve sources his raw material from working craft breweries. A by-product removal service called aGRO Systems collects the grains from breweries in Calgary and

Villeneuve picks up what he needs for his mushroom substrate. He notes that not all spent grains are created equally — the mushrooms thrive on a mix that consists of a particular size and type of grain that happens to match well with what urban breweries can supply.

“Different types of grains like oats or rye or wheat can affect the mushroom's growth,” Villeneuve says. “We like breweries that are efficient but not too efficient. The medium sized craft breweries have the kind of grain we look for.”

To keep up the sustainability factor, Ceres Solutions is also streamlining things by specializing in a single mushroom, namely the blue oyster mushroom, which is particularly coveted by restaurant chefs and keen home cooks. There are plans to grow new varieties as 2023 wears on, as well as an organic line of mushrooms that will have to be grown with a substrate other than that sourced from the spent grain.

The cycle of local grains begetting local beer begetting local mushrooms, and then either animal feed or soil that goes back into farmers’ fields to grow more plant-based food, is what gets Villeneuve most fired up, especially as we move into an era of soaring grocery prices and a continuing concern about the carbon footprint of transporting fresh produce from around the world to local stores. While mushrooms may not be the most substantial ingredient, they do add a lot of flair and flavour to any given dish and sourcing them locally from a sustainably minded company gives customers an environmentally conscious and more affordable option.

“Healthy food should not be a luxury. With our system we’re trying to make mushrooms as affordable as possible and as accessible to as many people as possible,” Villeneuve says. “We can have more affordable food and we can create really great local jobs if more things are grown where they're consumed.”

Villeneuve doesn’t want to get ahead of himself, but if he can grow mushrooms in shipping containers in Crossfield, this system could also enable mushroom farmers in other parts of the country or around the world to do the same. While Ceres Solutions may one day help solve some global issues surrounding food supply, for now, Villeneuve says that because of the support of Olds College, government funding agencies, and the local breweries, his innovation has to be seen as uniquely Albertan.

“We wouldn't have been able to develop this if I hadn’t been at Olds College and if we didn't have the provincial and federal support early on,” he says. “Then the investors who came on to help build our facility had the same mission and the same values in mind. We were really fortunate to have started this in Alberta.”