In today’s current food market, Canadians are wasting over 40% of the food that is produced for consumption. British Columbia also has the highest poverty rate in Canada at 12% and Vancouver, as a highly student-populated city, is vulnerable because of risks related to food insecurity for students.

Organic produce, which requires a higher cost for farmers to create, makes up a disproportionately high percentage of all ‘wasted’ food because these products lack the waxes and preserving sprays to make them last longer. We sought to address this issue and explored a more holistic approach in a circular economy, which supports principles such as sharing, maintaining/prolonging, reusing/redistribution, refurbishing/remanufacturing, recycling via traditional methods and recycling that involves specific resourcing for new processes.

As a solution, our team decided to collect non-sellable food from vendors and suppliers, wash, chop, spice, dehydrate and otherwise re-purpose these products into value-added products for sale. The result is Ugly Apples – creating dried apples and apple pie filling products for resale.