BC Startups Building Resilience Across Canada’s Complex Food Chain

British Columbia is renowned for its work in sustainability across sectors.

One of the most important areas to manage efficiency of resources is in food production and related industries. The farming industry may not excite many—but everybody will always need to eat, so this remains a critical area to find sustainable energy practices for.

Several BC startups have long been taking on a wide range of issues connected to an overall mission of innovating food systems for growth, resilience, and sustainability—now, and indefinitely into the future.

Let’s take a look at a few of these BC-born companies using tech to disrupt and improve Canada’s food systems in 2023.

Farment Biosolution

Farment Biosolution is an agtech startup on a mission to provide livestock farmers with cost-effective regenerative farming solutions to manage livestock waste, improve soil health, and reduce the environmental impact of livestock farming.

“Our fermentation technology reduces the need for chemical fertilizers by transforming nutrients into a more available form for plants, increasing soil water retention capacity and allowing farmers to produce more with less,” the VEC competitor says.

In order to match growing population demands, farmers have to produce more on the same amount of land. Fermentation makes nutrients more available and increases the soil water retention capacity, permitting farmers to grow with higher efficiency .

“At Farment, we understand the necessity of matching food availability with population growth,” the company states online. “With bio regenerative solutions, this is achievable without negatively impacting the environment and polluting our world.”

InHub

InHubs Farms’ vision is to revolutionize the North American food supply chain with a network of “smart mushroom farms” in every city.

The Vancouver company’s farms use robotics and smart control systems in the cloud to mimic how mushrooms grow in nature to improve taste, nutrition and yield.

“We grow our mushrooms right in the city on trees that we sustainably harvest,” InHubs states online. “We grow mushrooms that are just like the ones that grow in nature.”

By eliminating the need for fulfilment trips and supply chains, InHub Farms says it is both improving the taste of crops—”mushrooms don’t like long trips,” the founders note—and “actively contributing to the health of people, forests, and ecosystems.”

QuantoTech Solutions

QuantoTech is a BC-founded vertical farming company that designs, builds, and operates automated equipment.

Quanto’s team has designed micro-farm equipment for areas with populations of fewer than 1,000 people in order to help reduce imports and support small and remote communities in their bid to become more food secure.

The company also sells leafy greens and herbs through Northern Greens, an umbrella brand for produce grown at various vertical farms in central and northern BC, and beyond, using QuantoTech grow systems and standards.

Sentire

Sentire augments robots and advanced machines so they can learn a new task or react to complex environments, including farms.

The Vancouver company delivers artificial intelligence as-a-service in agriculture, horticulture, livestock farming, and forestry. Their unified machine learning workflow has been designed so users can deploy vision AI solutions via cloud or edge computing.

Sentire has also developed pre-trained APIs for users to infuse into existing models across a range of use cases such as optimal harvesting, crop management, yield estimation, and predictive modelling.

“We help enterprises in increasing revenues, lowering costs, and improving customer experiences,” the company says, without a “need for sophisticated tech skills or advanced infrastructure.”

Bioform Technologies

Bioform Technologies turns kelp and wood fibre, both of which are plentiful in BC, into thin yet durable bioplastic films. The UBC startups says these films can then be used for applications like agricultural mulch film, to regulate soil moisture and protect crops, or rigid packaging products.

The maneuver performs double-duty: utilizing used and renewable resources to create a natural plastic-like material, thus reducing new plastic creation, which pollutes.

“Polyethylene can stay in the soil for decades and cause significant environmental contamination,” says cofounder Dr. Jordan MacKenzie, who holds a PhD in fluid mechanics. “As well, food packaging waste is a long-standing problem—tonnes of beverage lids end up in the landfill because they’re almost impossible to recycle.”

The Canadian Food Innovation Network has  invested in Bioform via The Food Innovation Challenge.