Building Sustainability in the Food System

By Lois Harris

Cher 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.

“Our pivot was to really drive home the message that sustainability is a pain killer, not a vitamin, and if you think about and act on these things, it will make you more resilient in the future,” she says.

While they waited out the initial crisis of the pandemic, they got busy creating content – blog posts, white papers, webinars and more – to support the industry in its time of need. They also created R-Purpose Micro, as part of the Our Food Future initiative aimed at smaller manufacturers to help them build resilience and embed sustainable and circular principles in the business whether they stay small or decide to scale up. “In a way, MPO and the other original 16 members of the coalition created us, so now we’re here to provide services to them,” she says, adding that Provision Coalition is currently working with MPO on a circular transformation project for the meat industry that should be rolled out soon.

Moving Ahead For the future, Cher says Provision Coalition is focused on bringing circularity to the food system. Re(Purpose) is a program that aims to commercialize unavoidable by-products of the food system and find ways to make them into new grocery and menu items, rather than wasting them.

“After folks came out the other side of the crisis mode, we actually tripled our revenue and had the best year we’ve ever had,” Cher says. As an example, she points to an initiative that she and her team presented in October, 2020 that demonstrated the first ever circular restaurant meal.

She suggests that the pandemic has shone a light on the fragility of our natural and human systems, and that sustainability and circularity address both of those.

Cher says that being a member of MPO is about staying connected to the founding members who are committed to sustainability. It started with spent grains from brewing beer, which was then used to feed insects, which were fed to fish at a fish farm. The fish became the centrepiece in this circular meal. Other spent grains from the same brewery and spent yeast from a yeast lab were re-configured and baked into sourdough bread. High nutrient by-products from the fish farm were used to fertilize potatoes in the field. Chefs from local restaurants made three different meals from the resulting products. In the meat industry, Provision Coalition is looking at upcycling offal – to be made into pet food or exported to Asian markets. “We’re looking at ways we can use every single part of the animal,” she says, adding that she’s currently conducting feasibility studies with meat processors.

Provision Coalition Cher Mayweather Guelph, ON 519-822-2042 cmereweather@provisioncoalition.com www.provisioncoalition.com