ASSOCIATE MEMBER PROFILE
Building Sustainability
in the Food System By Lois Harris
C
her Mereweather is passionate about creating a more sustainable, circular food system, and she and her team are well on their way to achieving that goal by working with hundreds of companies over the years. “Inspired by the planet’s natural cycles, a circular food economy reimagines and regenerates the systems that feed us, eliminating waste, sharing economic prosperity, regenerating natural and human systems and ensuring people have access to healthy, nutritious food,” says the Founder, President and CEO of Provision Coalition Inc., a Meat & Poultry Ontario (MPO) associate member. The company is based in Guelph, Ontario, has five permanent staff and reaches out to a wide network of professionals for specific projects. Mereweather believes in transforming the system one company at a time, and she has worked with many food and beverage businesses, including meat processors like Maple Leaf Foods and Conestoga Farm Fresh Pork. “We start with determining their ‘why’ – why do they exist beyond profit?” she says, emphasizing that getting this part clear not only builds employee loyalty, it also helps consumers understand and support their value. She says it’s essential for companies to dig deep to figure out why they are doing what they’re doing – to emotionally connect with people on a goal that’s bigger than any individual or any business. “Take Provision Coalition, for example – why we do everything we do is about making food sustainably so we can achieve our vision of a circular food system,” she says, adding that when her
Cher Mereweather, Founder, President and CEO of Provision Coalition Inc.
team is making business decisions, they ask themselves whether the choice being presented supports their reason for being. Once the ‘why’ is clear, it can be built into the company’s brand story and they move on to other facets of the business – like reducing waste, keeping products and ingredients in play for as long as possible and looking at more circular packaging options so the waste doesn’t go into landfill. They also look at taking care of employees – to help them feel inspired, engaged and wanting to be a part of the company, rather than just showing up for the pay cheque. Provision Coalition has been up and running since 2013 – first as a non-profit with 17 member organizations that focused mostly on food and beverage manufacturers. Then, in the fall of 2019, it transitioned to a for-profit social enterprise, with a wider reach up and down the food chain. Pandemic Pivot When the pandemic hit, Cher and her team had already done emergency preparations thanks to a tip from her husband, who works in the pharmaceutical industry. He warned her weeks ahead of time of what he thought might happen. “We knew we could work from home – we all have laptops and could stay safe,” she says. “What we had not factored in was that, with the global announcement, all of our projects were put on pause.” Having been a for-profit for only about six months, Cher was worried about whether they were going to make it through the pandemic. She and her team recognized that sustainability might become a ‘nice to have’, rather than a ‘have to have’.
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BlockTalk - Summer 2021
www.meatpoultryon.ca
