Commitment required | Chef says it is not always easy to do the right thing
An increasing number of companies are jumping on the local food bandwagon, buying ingredients from their surrounding area when they can.
However, this effort rarely exceeds 30 percent of their total inventory.
Diversity Food Services, a University of Winnipeg-based catering service company, serving the university’s cafeterias and community events has gone beyond that.
Two food audits have shown the company buys 65 percent of its vegetables, grain, meat and eggs locally.
The company even goes the extra mile when it comes to coffee, buying from a local roaster, GreenBean Coffee Imports.
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Ian Vickers, chief operating officer of Diversity Food Services, said it would be hard to go beyond the 65 percent local mark.
“Let’s face it, for a good six months of the year, if you only purchased locally, you’re serving potatoes and beets,” he said.
“That said, everything we can get, we try to source as locally as possible, all the way down to our packaging materials, which are 100 percent compostable and dealing exclusively with local companies that make them.”
Chef Ben Kramer is responsible for ensuring the company buys local.
“I’ve been in Winnipeg for 14 years, so I have a pretty extensive network of farmers,” said Kramer.
“And that’s just from making the effort to source locally instead of using big wholesalers. So a lot of it is just word of mouth and reputation.”
Kramer buys much of his meat, such as precut and whole pork, from Harborside Farms, a livestock producer with an on-farm butcher shop at nearby Pilot Mound, Man.
“With the volume we use, we can’t do all our own butchering, so we use them for specific cuts here and there, and, when we have the time, we bring in whole pigs cut in half,” said Kramer.
“We do that mainly just to keep our skills up.”
The company is forced to buy its organic chicken from major companies.
“They’re the only ones that we can get processed chicken from be-cause of the quota system and as they’re not letting anyone do organic chickens unless you want to buy them whole,” Kramer said.
Diversity Food Services buys a lot of product from Prairie Flour Mills in Elie, Man.
The company also purchases produce from Fresh Option, a Winnipeg organic food distributor that buys from local farmers.
“We were dealing direct with a lot of the farms Fresh Options does, but, to help them build their wholesale business and for the convenience on our end, we now use Fresh Options as a sort of a middleman.”
Kramer also deals with a small network of mushroom growers.
“We do that direct,” he said.
“When they have it ready, they just call me from the forest and say, ‘we have 50 pounds coming your way,’ kind of thing.”
Kramer usually buys local berries through Neechi Commons, an aboriginal owned and operated worker co-operative, when it has them in stock. When not, he gets them from Fresh Options or Crampton’s Market, a Winnipeg food store that sources its produce from Manitoba farmers.
The company also employs marginalized people from the community.
“We employ people who are typically harder to employ,” said Kramer.
“Not all of our workforce, obviously, because we need some experienced and some skilled people, but part of what we do is provide jobs for people who would maybe struggle due to language barriers, cultural barriers or who live in the downtown core, who are aboriginal, or otherwise marginalized.”
He said this practice also benefits the company.
“We get to learn about new cultures and ways of doing things and we enjoy having a full diversity of staff. Outside of that, work ethic is 10 times what it is with North Americans, unfortunately,” he said.
“New Canadians and those who are being given an opportunity for the first time when they’ve been struggling for years tend to be a little more grateful. Their work ethic can just run circles around many privileged Canadians, for lack of a better term.”
He said the company’s philosophy requires commitment.
“In as many areas of the business as possible, we look at how we can do the right thing. And, of course, like every other business, there are a million reasons why you should take the easier, cheaper road,” he said.
“We tend to find solutions rather than taking the easy way out by saying, ‘we’ll just use Styrofoam from China.’ ”
