Upcycling distillers’ grains into highly nutritious flours in Montreal

In Canada, 58% of food is thrown away, wasting the resources necessary to the production of this food (land, water, energy). Every year, the 43 microbreweries in Montreal produce more than 3000 tons of distiller’s grains. To get rid of them, the brewers pay a fee of 450$ per month.

Since October 2019, Boomerang has been optimizing the food value chain by collecting microbreweries’ brewing residue. Most of the times this residue is being thrown away, composted, or given to animals, while being full of nutritive properties (high proteins and low in calories). Coop Boomerang is thus upcycling this residue by turning it into flour to create healthy and tempting products.

Boomerang is offering a distiller’s grains collection service to microbrewers, before transforming and selling the flour to bakers, chefs, and food processors.

Besides, Boomerang is a democratically runed company, as the individuals working at the company are also owning the company.

With such an initiative, Boomerang has been tackling food waste by recovering the wasted natural resources and reducing the impact of our food consumption on the environment. Furthermore, this keeps distillers’ grains to end up in landfill and produce greenhouse gases emissions.

In November 2019, the company received the Environment Prize from the city of Montreal.

This initiative has already started to being reproduced in a few breweries in New York, Paris, and Brussels. Boomerang is the first initiative aiming at solving this issue at the whole metropolitan level.