Ceres Solutions: Making mushrooms out of mash
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ne of the hottest topics in food supply circles right now is the question of what to do with the vast amount of food waste Canadians produce each year. While the waste that comes from overly ambitious vegetable purchases at home and leftover ingredients at restaurants is one thing, the massive amount of by-products from food and beverage production is also a huge part of the food waste equation. Here in Alberta, our never-ending supply of craft beer creates mountains of brewers’ spent grain — that is, the oatmeal-like mash that remains after the brewing process. Recognizing the wastefulness of simply dumping tonnes of organic material still full of useful protein and fibre, breweries in Alberta tend to send a lot of their by-products off to farmers as cattle feed, while others have tried making it into bread or pizza dough. When Ceres Solutions’ founder, Alex Villeneuve, was studying brewing at Olds College in 2015, he saw another, less obvious but more innovative possibility for all that spent grain. He started using it to grow mushrooms. “I’ve always been excited about mushrooms,” Villeneuve says. “I’ve always loved finding and identifying them on hikes and thought they were fascinating. I saw all the grain coming out of the craft brewing process at Olds College and being sent off to compost or to the dump and I thought, ‘Wow, this is the best grain in the entire world and we're not utilizing it’.” Villeneuve, who is originally from Edmonton, also studied culinary arts at NAIT, knew that mushrooms could flourish in the spent grain and took to experimenting with growing fungus in Zip-Loc bags stashed in his dorm room closet. Through the Olds College Centre for Innovation, he connected with funding bodies that helped him to develop a unique system that involves transforming the spent grain into a nutrient-rich mushroom substrate, sterilizing it to make sure that
18 Culinaire | March 2023
BY ELIZABETH CHORNEY-BOOTH
no competing fungi try to duke it out with his gourmet mushrooms, and then seeding it with a starter culture. The result is a hanging tube that sprouts a healthy crop of mushrooms, ready to be harvested and sold to local restaurants and markets. “We’ve developed a system that does all of the major steps of mushroom processing in one automated vessel that requires very little input, and is really efficient in terms of square footage and utility usage,” Villeneuve says. “It’s much more efficient than existing or conventional methods.” After spending several years longer than he intended at Olds College so he could focus on the project, a little over a year ago Villeneuve decided he was ready to take Ceres to the next level and moved his operation to a commercial demonstration
facility in Crossfield, where his tubes of mushroom substrate hang in a series of shipping containers. Originally, his circular system involved upcycling the grains a second time as a protein-heavy cattle feed after the mushrooms are harvested, but provincial regulations posed some complications, so that is on the backburner for now. The current model sees the used substrate being fed to worms and then used in farmland as an ultra-rich soil. Now that Ceres Solutions’ home base is no longer at an institution with a renowned brewing program and a steady supply of brewer’s spent grains, Villeneuve sources his raw material from working craft breweries. A by-product removal service called aGRO Systems collects the grains from breweries in Calgary and