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Canada's Food Price Report 2025, Farting Cows & guest Gordon Neal of RFINE Biomass Solutions
Season 5 Episode 15
This episode of The Food Professor #podcast highlights the release of Canada's Food Price Report, forecasting a 3-5% increase in food costs for 2025, translating to an additional $801 yearly expense for a family of four. Key drivers include escalating meat prices due to small herd sizes, pork inflation, and avian flu impacting poultry. The eastern provinces face heightened food inflation due to logistics and cyclical patterns.
The report incorporates machine learning, econometrics, and collaboration across universities, emphasizing transparency through self-assessment. It also sheds light on food insecurity in northern communities, aiming to influence policy and consumer awareness.
The episode also features Gordon Neal, co-founder and general manager of RFINE Biomass Solutions, based in Halifax recorded live at the Coffee Association of Canada’s conference live; turning Spent Coffee Grounds into Eco-Conscious Profits, RFINE is revolutionizing the quick service coffee industry by developing technology to sustainably upcycle spent coffee grounds into food-grade ingredients, thereby diverting coffee ground waste from going to landfills and saving retailers money on disposal costs.
Gordon's company transforms spent coffee grounds—80 tractor-trailers daily in Canada—into food-grade ingredients, tackling food waste and methane emissions. Neal describes developing innovative, patented appliances for coffee shops that dehydrate grounds onsite for upcycling into products like cocoa substitutes, animal feed, and ingredients for black soldier fly larvae farming.
The discussion transitions to alternative proteins and sustainability, emphasizing public hesitance to change diets for climate reasons but highlighting economic incentives as effective drivers of behaviour change. The episode underscores how rising costs push consumers toward plant-based options.
We conclude with reflections on consumer engagement, policy challenges like GST on food, and the potential environmental impact of methane-reducing feed additives for cattle, urging transparency and quality assessments.
The Food Professor #podcast is presented by Caddle.
About Us
Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is a Professor in food distribution and policy in the Faculties of Management and Agriculture at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He is also the Senior Director of the Agri-food Analytics Lab, also located at Dalhousie University. Before joining Dalhousie, he was affiliated with the University of Guelph’s Arrell Food Institute, which he co-founded. Known as “The Food Professor”, his current research interest lies in the broad area of food distribution, security and safety. Google Scholar ranks him as one of the world's most cited scholars in food supply chain management, food value chains and traceability.
He has authored five books on global food systems, his most recent one published in 2017 by Wiley-Blackwell entitled “Food Safety, Risk Intelligence and Benchmarking”. He has also published over 500 peer-reviewed journal articles in several academic publications. Furthermore, his research has been featured in several newspapers and media groups, including The Lancet, The Economist, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BBC, NBC, ABC, Fox News, Foreign Affairs, the Globe & Mail, the National Post and the Toronto Star.
Dr. Charlebois sits on a few company boards, and supports many organizations as a special advisor, including some publicly traded companies. Charlebois is also a member of the Scientific Council of the Business Scientific Institute, based in Luxemburg. Dr. Charlebois is a member of the Global Food Traceability Centre’s Advisory Board bas
Published on 1 year ago