Okanagan College's Unusually Good Apple Juice flowing into Superstores
It’s not yet a flood of apple juice but Okanagan College’s Unusually Good Food Co. has a deal with Loblaws to sell its juice throughout Western Canada.
The pilot project will put 19 pallets in 19 Loblaws' outlets from Kelowna to Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories.
“We’re working with an in-and-out model, so this is just a pilot run with a mass purchase of pallets,” Unusually Good’s manager, Mandi Kohout, told iNFOnews.ca. “We’ll see how it goes but it has allowed us to increase our apple chip donations to all locations in Western Canada as well.”
Each pallet has 168 boxes of juice.
The company started at the college in 2008 and is part of the Enactus program, an international organization that is a “catalyst for positive social and environmental impact” through student-created and -run businesses, according to its website.
Last November, Unusually Good finished in the top four in the Enactus World Cup in Puerto Rico and, in May, will defend its national title.
READ MORE: Okanagan College’s Unusually Good Food project among best in the world
It harvests apples that are too big, too small or misshapen so not acceptable for sale in grocery stores. Right now they pick from only one orchard but that may expand.
They dehydrate the apples into chips that are supplied to people in need locally and internationally.
That distribution network includes the 19 Loblaws stores this year.
“For each store location, we’ve sent a 12-pound box of apple chips for them to donate to an organization in their communities,” Kohout said. “We found that we don’t really understand the need in all of these farther away communities as well as we do in our own communities so we thought, who better to know who needs these donations than the local store owners?”
While the program started off relying on student volunteer labour, it is now hiring experienced pickers and contracting out the processing of its juice and candles.
The candles are “up-cycled cute travel candles using the apple pomace left after pressing our Unusually Good apple ciders,” its website says. “Purchasing one apple candle allows us to provide 103 apple chip servings to hungry kids.”
The candles sell for $15 each but, like the cherry juice and apple cider available on the Unusually Good website, they are all marked as sold out.
The group has not lost touch with its roots. It has about 50 volunteers coming out each year to help with the picking.
READ MORE: Look out Sun-Rype, here comes Okanagan College’s Unusually Good Food Co.
“Volunteer picking has really resonated with people in the community and we have received quite a few emails and phone calls asking us when we’ve arranged those picking days because it has, I feel, settled into the community and we have a lot of people who really love to do it,” Kohout said.
That includes both members of the public and students, although the hired pickers are way faster, Kohout said.
Unusually Good is a bit unusual for its longevity since there is constant turnover of students when they graduate.
Many other Enactus programs either shut down or are taken over by businesses but Kohout is Unusually Good’s third manager. She’s only in the second year of her four-year accounting program at the Vernon campus so has a couple more years to go.
So far, Unusually Good has saved 69,535 kilograms of apples from going to waste. That’s created more than 135,000 servings of apple chips that have gone to more than 22,000 children.
To contact a reporter for this story, email Rob Munro or call 250-808-0143 or email the editor. You can also submit photos, videos or news tips to the newsroom and be entered to win a monthly prize draw.
We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor in the link above.
