A group of students and faculty from George Brown in Toronto are working together to solve the issue of food waste on campus, and the solution will cause quite the buzz.
Turning old cocktail garnishes into more cocktails? It may seem like a notion from some old mythological text — a cup that never runs dry — but it’s also a real thing that’s happening at George Brown’s School of Hospitality and Culinary Arts.
Over the past 18 months, a team of over 250 students and faculty, alongside help from Reid’s Distillery, have created a solution that allows wasted food scraps to be turned into a small-batch vodka that they’ve called Citronino.
It all began when staff lead and professor Tammy Vaillancourt joined forces with colleagues Doris Miculan Bradley and Chris Bain to create a solution for the food waste coming out of one specific class.
“Chris Bain teaches a Mixology course, and there’s a lot of waste that comes out of that class, specifically in the garnishes,” Tammy tells blogTO.
“We decided that we would collect and freeze the waste, and then we would separate the pulp, the juice and the peel, and then we would find a partner to see if we could create a beverage by upcycling our waste.”
Upon pitching the project and securing $15,000 in funding for research, the faculty team then set out towards making this idea a reality, which included reaching out to Reid’s, who regularly invite George Brown students in for visits to see how their spirits are made. Equally inspired and intrigued by the mission, they quickly signed on.
Then, it was on to hiring students and alumni to make it happen, with over 250 eventually being involved from start to finish, including research, focus groups, waste collection and marketing.
One George Brown student was even hired to design the bottle’s label, incorporating the school’s branding and mascot with an Italian theme.
Food and Beverage Management alumni (and current George Brown employee) Santiago Escobar Nassar signed on to the project as a student researcher, intrigued by the ambitious idea of repurposing waste into a beverage.
Santiago’s job, he told blogTO, was to assist with focus group testing, assessing reactions to the drink and the concept at large.
What initially was expected to be a potentially years-long project ultimately materialized within a matter of 18 months, Tammy tells blogTO, in no small part thanks to the enthusiastic efforts of everyone involved.
“We initially thought, ‘let’s see if we can get 20 bottles out of this,’ but we ended up collecting just a little over 110 pounds of citrus waste, and we produced 211 bottles of Citronino,” she says.
The liquor officially launched at the George Brown campus on April 9, 2024, with a huge event that included, among cocktails made with Citronino, a 360-degree VR experience where you could walk through the distillation process from start to finish.
In the summer, the drink placed second in a national beverage competition.
And they’re already gearing up for their second launch this coming February, now planning to churn out a batch of Citronino annually after the smashing success of the first one, although, given the nature of the product, expect Citronino 2.0 to be a completely unique product.
The final project.
For both Tammy and Santiago, and, surely, the hordes of students who also contributed to the project, the biggest draw was having the opportunity to actually practice sustainability on campus, rather than have it exist almost exclusively in theory as is all too common.
“Oftentimes, when we talk about core values in an institution, it’s one thing to talk about [them] and it’s another thing to make them hands-on applicable, that when people hear the core values, they’re like ‘you’re actually showcasing, from an application standpoint, those core values,'” Tammy says.
“For me, it was basically the idea that we were able to go from that theory to the practice, and not only to the practice, but to really create something,” Santiago adds.
“I believe that if you’re able to show that you’re in for sustainability, not because it’s a trendy thing or it’s the new hip things, but it’s really something that you care about and that you are willing to change […] that has a good impact.”
As Citronino continues to grow and evolve, Tammy tells blogTO, the ultimate dream is to have it served and available for purchase through Reid’s, but for now, if you want to get a taste, you can try Citronino at George Brown’s campus restaurant, The Chef’s House.
