Local food in Ontario is about to go public thanks to a little cash incentive from the provincial government.
More than $1.5-million worth of grants were announced Tuesday to bump up the amount of homegrown food served across a broad slate of taxpayer-funded institutions, including a pair of , municipalities, postsecondary schools and a northern native reserve.
The money isn’t destined to subsidize menus, however. Drawn from the Broader Public Sector Investment Fund, which was created last year, the grants are intended to remove stumbling blocks that prevent institutions from buying local food. Chief among those are price and access.
“Because public institutions operate on limited budgets, their whole criteria for sourcing is essentially ‘find us the cheapest food in the world, no matter where it’s produced …’” said Bill Duron, program director of the Greenbelt Fund, which administers the grants on behalf of the province.
Large food suppliers responded to that price sensitivity by sourcing cheaper imported food. Over time, local farmers were dropped from their supply lists in favour of producers able to provide inexpensive mass quantities of food. Now, interest in purchasing local food is booming, bolstered by the fact that local prices have become more competitive due to high transportation costs affecting imports. But many of the distributors that institutions rely on have lost their local connections.
To help repair those links, some of the grant money will go to support small distributors who specialize in forging local food connections. One of those is 100 Km Foods Inc., a Toronto business that started out linking farmers to restaurant chefs. Having won a $171,000 grant, the business will expand its distribution model to connect with buyers for public institutions such as the Greater Toronto Airport Authority and the University of Toronto.
Their likelihood of success is high. Gordon Food Service, a large distributor that was awarded $360,000 through the BPS fund last year to overhaul its approach to local food, increased the amount of Ontario food sold through its ordering system by $540,000 over the last two quarters.
Those numbers are encouraging to local farmers itching to step up to the plate.
“The days of having cheap access to cheap food from other countries you can’t find on a map are ending,” said Jamie Reaume, director of the Holland Marsh Growers’ Association, which represents more than 100 farmers growing more than 225 varieties of crops and livestock on a fertile belt of land north of Toronto. “We’re growing all the stuff they [institutions] are looking for.”
To help convey this to institutional buyers, many of whom cite their lack of connections with reliable local farmers as a daunting roadblock, Mr. Reaume won a $50,000 grant to hire a broker to connect farmers and buyers. The broker will help battle misconceptions that there isn’t enough local food to meet institutional demands.
“We have 50,000 pounds of onions that we can’t move because there’s an impression that we don’t have it,” Mr. Reaume said.
Another key chunk of grant money is earmarked for George Brown College, where culinary students will learn how to increase their use of Ontario food year-round via a new food-processing and preserving operation. Ideally, the program will have a ripple effect that extends beyond the farm, aiding the environment, boosting demand for food-related research and feeding the provincial economy, said Carol Mitchell, Ontario’s Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.
“When you buy local,” she said, “everybody wins.”
