The Toronto Distillery Company: It’s a micro-distiller, and it reflects a new generation of whiskymakers making products for a new generation of whisky drinkers. Charles Benoît and Jesse Razaqpur focus on highly traceable and locally sourced grain for their whisky. In a world built for Hiram Walker, one of the world’s largest distillers, to sell to the LCBO, the world’s largest purchaser of beverage alcohol, operating an innovative still at a small scale has presented challenges and opportunities.
The Toronto Distillery Company: It’s a microdistiller, and it reflects a new generation of whiskymakers making products for a new generation of whisky drinkers. Charles Benoît and Jesse Razaqpur focus on highly traceable and locally sourced grain for their whisky. In a world built for Hiram Walker, one of the world’s largest distillers, to sell to the LCBO, the world’s largest purchaser of beverage alcohol, operating an innovative still at a small scale has presented challenges and opportunities.
For episode one, we're talking Food Recovery. At its simplest, enabling food recovery organizations is a common sense approach to improving the viability of our environmental and economic systems. But it’s a huge task that we often take for granted in Toronto – there are many regions that don’t have the same capacity that Second Harvest has provided for so long. Second Harvest's Debra Lawson and her team are exceptional and adept at seeing what’s happening in our food chain, how it affects people, and how it can be improved.
Second Harvest is an organization that needs no introduction in Canada – it’s the largest food recovery organization in the country. It provides something like 22,000 meals a day to those who are food insecure, and it has since grown to provides meals to kids when they’re not in school and receiving a school breakfast, and Second Harvest also runs harvest kitchens with a view to teaching people cooking skills. SecondHarvest.ca is the website where you can find out more, or through Cori MacPhee, who runs @2ndharvestTO – it’s an organization worth your time to learn about and think about the services that it provides.
In July 2014, a three-year investigation by the CFIA into the operations of Mucci International Marketing Inc. and Mucci Pac Ltd. found that $1 Million worth of tomatoes labeled as a “Product of Canada” were, in fact, imported from Mexico. The investigation resulted in charges being laid against these companies as well as two Mucci Farms executives and on June 6, 2016, CFIA issued massive penalties against Mucci Farms: the corporations were convicted and fined $1.2 million and sentenced to three years of probation and the executives were fined $150,000 each and sentenced to three months of probation. With victim fine surcharges, the total fine meted out could eclipse $1.9 million.
