Vancouver Sun

How do you like them apples?

Victoria fruit-tree project launches social enterprise with cider spinoff

- RANDY SHORE rshore@postmedia.com

Victoria’s non-profit, fruit-tree harvesting program is reducing its reliance on donations by putting its spare apples to an ancient and delicious use.

Backyard Blend Cider is produced in a partnershi­p between the LifeCycles Project and Spinnaker’s Brewpub, helping push the group’s social enterprise earnings to $12,000 last year.

“We get most of our funds through grants and donations, the usual litany of sources that support non-profits,” said Matthew Kemshaw, executive director for LifeCycles.

“We are really looking to grow our social enterprise,” he said. “This year we are adding services and other products, such as treecare services. So we can focus not just on the fruit, but the tree and give some care to the urban orchard. That would include pruning and selling fertilizer.”

Now in its 20th season, LifeCycles has 400 volunteers on board to pick fruit in the yards of 650 homeowners.

“When it started out the idea was to redistribu­te fruit from people’s yards that would otherwise go to waste to food banks and community kitchens,” he said. “So the beneficiar­ies were people who accessed emergency food resources.”

For many years, the fruit was split into three shares: one-third for homeowners, one-third for volunteer pickers and one-third for donation.

“In reality, the homeowners get about 10 per cent because that’s all they want and the balance would go to community initiative­s,” said Kemshaw.

But in 2010, the group decided to try to monetize some of the surplus to pay the project’s programmin­g and expenses. LifeCycles spends about $80,000 a year on salaries, equipment, insurance and transporta­tion.

“We’ve done all sort of products,” he said. “Sometimes that’s bulk fruit and juice, which we’ve sold to gelato-makers and popsicle makers. We’ve worked with a few different cider makers over the years. We make quince paste that we sell through delis.”

But the cider business has more than doubled their income.

“We do the work of picking and processing the fruit and the brewers at Spinnaker’s do the work of making the cider and bottling it,” he said. “We make the labels. They take some of the money to cover their costs and we take the rest, about $3.25 a bottle.”

In addition, Spinnaker’s buys apple juice from LifeCycles to make their own cider.

Our juice is exceptiona­l for cider because of the varietals we get,” he said. “The end product has a lot of complexity and it’s hard to achieve that kind of depth.”

The group maintains a community orchard in View Royal, which is home to 200 varieties of fruit trees including 150 different apples.

LifeCycles’ success is the envy of Casey Hamilton, a dietitian and executive director of the Okanagan Fruit Tree Project, who would love to duplicate their social enterprise model.

The Okanagan group has managed to hold three juicing events in its six-year history and pulls in about $3,000 to $5,000 each time.

“Early on we had access to an orchard that had grown a bit wild and we thought juicing would be a great fundraiser,” she said.

But the expense and logistics of renting a juicing truck and organizing 50 volunteers are daunting, especially with a razor-thin budget of $12,000 a year, most of which goes to two paid co-ordinators.

“Some years we just don’t have enough money to pay for the juicing. We don’t have the equipment or even a place to store it. And more lately, I’ve been working full time, finishing my master’s degree and running this off of the side of my desk.”

With her master’s done, Hamilton is ready to press a social enterprise program into existence, exploiting what the Okanagan project has in abundance: Fruit in amounts that dwarf what urban pickers can access.

Last year volunteers picked about 58,000 pounds of fruit in the Central and South Okanagan, but there is far more left unpicked.

“The amount of fruit we pick doubles every year,” she said. “What we need now are sustainabl­e revenue sources, a business plan and a strategy for acquiring equipment.”

 ??  ?? Volunteer pickers like JF Savard gather 60,000 pounds of fruit each year from people’s yards in the Victoria area.
Volunteer pickers like JF Savard gather 60,000 pounds of fruit each year from people’s yards in the Victoria area.

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