Stormfisher: Excited About Repurposing Food Waste

Brandon Moffatt, vice president, development at StormFisher – a renewable gas infrastructure developer and operator – said the company focuses primarily on converting food waste to renewable natural gas (RNG) with their facilities in London and Drumbo, Ontario. “We are developing new infrastructure using a process called Power to Gas,” he said. This process involves using low-carbon power sources to produce green hydrogen or renewable natural gas.

In 2006, the founders seized the opportunity to start a renewable energy company when the market started to take off in Ontario. After considering various types of renewable energy, they decided to focus on biogas because it had great environmental implications. While the company has grown and changed over the years, “We’re still the developers that we were when we started the business,” Moffatt said.

Innovation Guelph helped the company with product development support and a go to market strategy through its Fuel Injection program and later through the Fast Lane program by supporting their corporate strategy decision-making process. Moffatt said the company has doubled the size of their team since then! In fact, they’ve experienced some of that growth specifically during COVID. “We have grown during this period as more food waste was produced because people were spending more time at home generating diverted material that could be used by us,” Moffatt said. “We have also seen an increased focus on climate-related matters that has increased the demand for our products leading to more infrastructure development.”

With recent growth, Stormfisher has a new facility in Drumbo that processes municipal source separated organics (SSO) into an engineered organic cake-form feedstock. The facility separates out the inorganics (forks, plastics, etc.) that may have come in with the SSO. The facility reduces food waste going to landfill from multiple sources including grocery stores. “We work with a number of grocery chains and can pull in franchise stores into our collections routes depending on their locations,” Moffatt said. Stormfisher will work with commercial customers to find the most economical solutions for them depending on the volume of waste and their location (preferably within 100 miles of the facility). “If it could have or would have been food, then we can receive it,” he said. “This includes meats, vegetables and all other types of food.”