Montreal company fighting food waste with juicy innovations

It's estimated some four million Canadians struggle to put food on the table, and yet about a third of all the food produced in the world ends up in a landfill.

It's known as ugly produce fruits and vegetables either too small or misshapen to meet the high standards

Six years ago, partners David Coté and Julie Poitras-Saulnier set out to put some of that wasted food to use.

"We got a phone call from the most important produce distributors in Canada saying that he was throwing out more than 20 tons of fruits and vegetables every single day," said Poitras-Saulnier.

The pair quit their jobs, sold their house and started the Montreal-based company LOOP Mission to turn discarded fruits and veggies into juice.

"We save about 100 tons a week now. It's huge, what we're saving but it's still a small amount compared to what's thrown away," said Coté.

The company's website boasts the innovative ways it's diverting waste from the landfills, incuding turning day-old bread into beer, distilling gin from scraps from a potato chip factory, and soaps made from discarded cooking oils. 

But food waste isn't only a hunger issue. It makes the food we buy more expensive and is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

"When you send organic waste to the landfill, it's actually the worst thing you can send to the landfill because it's lacking the elements that are essential to decomposition, which is like the oxygen, the light, so it doesn't decompose it creates methane in huge quantities," said Poitras-Saulnier.

Since it started, LOOP has already rescued more than 15,000 tons of food preventing more than 12,000 thousand tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

While the produce they use for their juices was destined for the landfill, Coté said the company insists on paying.

"For us, it's very important that the person who really takes care of his waste and wants to diminish it actually gets money out of it, so we actually pay for our product," he said.

"But of course, we pay a cheaper price than what the market price would be."

The company hopes by creating a market for so-called ugly food that attitudes will start to change, and the food industry might think twice before throwing it away.