101: Upcycling Imperfect Produce into Healthy Eats with Monique Chan of Bruized

We started off this season looking at just how much Canadians wasted food, and how food systems management can be used to tackle this from a research based perspective. But the realities of how to navigate food waste, and the chain from supplier to consumer get a bit more murky. So how can it be done?

This week, I’m chatting with Monique Chan, who is working on a solution through her company, Bruized. Monique is a 26-year old creative from Toronto, Ontario. She founded Bruized in 2019 as a way to combat the food waste crisis through upcycling commonly discarded ingredients like juice pulp, imperfect produce, and more into tasty, plant based snacks. At Bruized, the mission is to create feel good food for the planet and people. Well finding renewed purpose for the ingredients they rescue, Monique and her team see the potential where others see waste, and want to help break the stigma around wasted food. By embracing the imperfections of the foods we eat and within ourselves, she sees it as a way of working towards a more sustainable future.

Monique today discusses how she started Bruized, some of the major challenges of working within food waste, and creative ways to start thinking about using your own food waste in scraps. She also highlights some of the lessons that we can learn about ourselves through thinking about food waste, which I found so fascinating.

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