Michael Pollan recently stated in his lecture “A Brief History of Modern Food System” that there is currently a cultural forgetting, a kind of amnesia of where our food comes from. It’s easy for us to jump at the assumption that food comes from supermarkets and forget about the people who dedicate their life and hard work to producing food in their farms. So who are these food producers and what are their stories? Provender, a Montreal-based food technology startup brings food producers and chefs together with their use of technology in order to build a sustainable food system. I sat down with Caithrin Rintoul, the CEO of Provender, to talk more about how Provender aims to disrupt the food supply chain by connecting people directly from farm to fork.
GaryUpton.McMillanLet’s start from the beginning: What is your history with food and technology? How did you become so passionate about local food movement and food sustainability?
Cai: I started my story with food and technology a long time ago. I worked at the kitchens in top restaurants like Au Pied de Cochon and Joe Beef. These experiences gave me a great exposure to amazing products, and that really grew into a love of wanting to know more — where the producers come from, what kind of stories they have and what their products are like. I also worked at Marche Fermier and organized pop up farmers markets all across the city.
Then I went into the food technology industry — I joined Lufa Farms during their first year of operation as their product manager and I worked at Plantagon in Sweden, designing systems for waste-to-energy conversion. I basically became a big nerd in the subject of food and agriculture. It became a total passion of mine.
Jardins.Epices.Can you tell us a bit more about what Provender does?
Cai:  Food producers who make incredible products often don’t have any direct marketing channels. The middlemen keep them very far apart from the customers and therefore create an opaque market as they keep adding value over the supply chain to maximize profits. Provender aims to solve this problem through technology, providing tools for farmers to manage their inventory and sell their products directly to buyers by cutting the middlemen at our online marketplace. We also think the point between planting and harvest is actually the most important moment in agriculture. Our business focuses on helping farmers to manage their inventory between the moment of planting and the moment of sale. Ideally, when you harvest something, it should be already sold to a buyer who wants it.
So the principle of our business to create direct relationships between farmers and buyers to get products out of the door faster and better. Michael Pollan always says ‘shake the hands that feed you’ and I think that’s pretty true. We visit every farm that we work with, sometimes it’s a quick visit while we spend hours at others. Fundamentally what we believe is that any time that you’re trying to tell a story of a farm, it needs to be authentic. You need to know the person and what they’re up to. Some farmers also really need help with marketing of their farms. It’s a big part of our role at Provender to help them package the whole thing to look good, especially on the Internet.
Eggplant.RedOrachWas there any challenge signing up farmers and chefs when Provender first launched?
Cai: The business model of agriculture is real broken and unfortunately what that creates is a situation where farmers can be exploited pretty easily. It’s hard to make a living when you’re farming. In fact, 80% of our farmers in Canada have a second job. So the great part about Provender is that we’re really helping farmers to get to the market with way better margins than anywhere else. In return, it’s easy for us to sign up farmers because people are desperate for change. On the chefs’ side, I think everyone is really desperate to see change too. Not only do they want to be able to connect directly with the people who grow their food, they also want to be able to make decisions with farmers about what goes into the field and the products that show up at their doors […] I also think the general public has woken up to the reality about where our food comes from. We want local sustainable food — if we’re walking through the front door, we still care about what’s walking in the backdoor. And that’s what Provender is really proud to serve.
1-uPLY1Fn5ti7LdiID9HpMLwHow does technology come into play in food sustainability at Provender?
Cai: We’ve been working hard to integrate more tools for our farmers to help them make even better decisions around how they are going to market. One of those tools is to allow them to deliver to a core group of buyers that they can target in a single neighborhood. It doesn’t have to be only a city neighborhood, it could also be a county if they want to help other farmers into selling in their own communities.
Farm.VisitYou tweeted that the best part of your job is Menu Planting. Can you explain more about it?
Cai: We host meetings with farmers and chefs to go through seed catalogs and decide what’s going to go into the ground next season. Not only does it help supply and demand function more sufficiently, get chefs what they really want in their kitchen and help farmers with the maximization of their revenue with their fields, it also increases the diversity of the food system enormously. If you look at the next decade, diversity in food is really important because climate change and factors beyond the farms’ control will mean that we’ll need a lot of different kinds of seeds if we want a very sustainable and long-term strategy for agriculture. What menu planting does is bring the creativity of a kitchen into the perspective on food and gives the support to farmers that they need to take the risk.
Preservation.Society.
What are your thoughts on the future of food and the global food system?
Cai: The average age of North-American farmers is about 59. I’m about the only person on earth that thinks that number is going to go down in the next few years. I think that right now we’re at the cusp of a really interesting moment of agriculture where millions of acres of land are going to change hands to the younger generation. Those people would really want to find a good business model for agriculture. I predict that this would be a more youthful food system. It’s going to be a more idealistic one, it’s going to be more complicated before it gets less complicated because I think we need to be able to embrace the fact that growing food sustainability is way harder than mono-cropping thousands of acres of crops. In order to be able to embrace that, you need to understand who is going to drive that change and I think the answer is young folks.
Chef.SeanSmith.DSDM