Power to the pomace: Kirk Moir upcycles wine waste to pair flavour with sustainability

From the rarest roasts to the sweetest shortcakes, the proper pairing of a wine can enhance the flavour of any dish. However, despite its delicious addition to food, the production of wine often has wasted by-products that can end up in landfills. But Kirk Moir and the team at Crush Dynamics are on a mission to prove that wine waste can be just as versatile and complimentary as the drink itself.

Through the grapevine

Kirk is no stranger to the world of agriculture. Growing up on a farm in Manitoba, it was always an important part of his life, but his path took a turn in university. Majoring in computer engineering, he embraced an entrepreneurial spirit by working to get start-ups off the ground. He loved the challenge of scaling up companies and transforming prototypes into a commercial product, but through it all, Kirk never forgot his agricultural roots.

By 2019, Kirk was looking for a new venture. He'd just sold his company, and a friend told him about a start-up called Crush Dynamics in the unceded lands of Syilx Okanagan Nation in Okanagan Valley. The company, Kirk learned, had created a process that would help wineries repurpose their wasted by-products through upcycling. Though he hadn't thought much about food waste, let alone upcycling, he was intrigued and quickly set up a meeting with the co-founders of Crush Dynamics, Bill and Alexandra Broddy, and their head scientist, Gary Strachan.

Bill told Kirk about the origin of Crush: while riding his bike one day, Bill encountered a bear and her cubs eating a winery's discarded pomace. When he asked Gary about it later, Gary, a former Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) wine and viticulture researcher, explained that pomace was filled with polyphenols, a compound found in plants that gives it a bitter flavour. It's often disposed of because it's too bitter for people to eat, yet it's still full of nutrients and hearty organic matter, making it the perfect meal for a bear preparing for hibernation.

Bill, Alexandra and Gary were already working to change that bitter taste into something palatable. If wine was paired with food to enhance the flavour, then why couldn't they do the same with the leftover pomace? They'd found success adding dried pomace powder into foods, like sausages, cheeses, and crackers, but Bill realized there was still a lot of untapped potential in the pomace.

Kirk saw this gap as the perfect next opportunity: "It was a return to my agricultural roots while using my experience working in start-ups. The idea of putting a dent in wine waste was exciting," Kirk recalls.

With Kirk's entrepreneurial connections, the team began rethinking how winemakers saw their waste.

Ferment to be

While heat-drying was effective at preserving the pomace, it took a lot of time and energy—which worked as a local solution but not on a global scale. Worse still, drying the pomace made it even more bitter, limiting its potential.

Timing was also an issue. Once winemakers pressed their grapes, the pomace needed to be processed quickly, or it would spoil. The team needed a seamless process, one that would be easy for wineries across the world to implement.

The answer was fermentation.

"We found that a fermentation-based process softens the polyphenols, which debitters the pomace," Kirk explains.

Instead of tossing their pomace onto a compost pile, wineries would put it into a specialized transportable container that preserved the cells in the pomace through fermentation. This container, called a bioreactor, would start the fermentation at the winery and would then be transported to a central facility to complete the process.

The result would be a flavourful purée that was more cost-effective to produce and filled with antioxidants, which protect cells from dangerous, naturally forming chemicals. Not only did the large number of antioxidants in the fermented pomace extend the shelf life of foods that used the purée, but it would also enhance other ingredients—making salts saltier and sugars sweeter—allowing food processors to reduce their use of salt and sugar.

With Kirk's knowledge of start-ups and the scientific groundwork laid out by the team, they were ready to make their bioreactor more widely available. However, this came with a whole host of new challenges, all of which would require a lot of resources and connections.

In the end, they needed a little help from a friend.

An expanding network

When that friend told Kirk about AAFC's Food Waste Reduction Challenge: Novel Technologies streams, Kirk felt that it was a great opportunity to demonstrate how his team's technology could help build a zero-waste wine industry to a jury of experts.

It all paid off when they were announced as one of the semi-finalists and received a grant for $100,000, which went towards making the bioreactor available outside the Okanagan Valley. But more valuable than the funding were the connections they made through participating in the Challenge.

During stage two of the Challenge, Kirk attended an event called Talk2Scientists. As one of the non-financial supports offered by the Challenge to semi-finalists of the Novel Technologies streams, the event gave Kirk and his team an opportunity to meet with advisors from either Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada or National Research Council Canada (NRC). Advisors offered guidance ranging from business financing to technical advice and helped semi-finalists use various government programs and services.

"We were pretty skeptical about the event at first, but by the initial slide, we learned about the Sustainable Protein Production program, which seeks to increase the value of plant-based proteins," Kirk says. "Since then, we've started collaborating with their team at the NRC to use sustainable proteins for our purées."

At every step, the connections Kirk and his team made have brought their vision closer to life. Since the Challenge, they've been able to expand their networks and commercialize their technology with food processors incorporating their purée into recipes. Now, Kirk feels they are ready for what has been their goal all along: helping winemakers around the world realize the power in the pomace.

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