At Fiesta Farms we are always impressed by indi­vid­u­als or com­pa­nies who find inno­v­a­tive, cre­ative ways to use as much of a par­tic­u­lar prod­uct as pos­si­ble. The nose to tail move­ment in the culi­nary world has proven that uti­liz­ing the entire ani­mal –waste not, want not– is not only deli­cious, eth­i­cally and eco­log­i­cally sound, and mind-opening, it can be lucra­tive as well.
There are many other exam­ples as well out­side of the boucherie: orange and lemon oils har­vested from the juice indus­try are used for clean­ing prod­ucts, spelt from the brew­ing indus­try used to feed hens and even on a more mod­est scale, some­one like Heather Thorkelson using avo­cado pits to make but­tons.

It just goes to show you that with a lit­tle lat­eral think­ing you can come up with a great prod­uct that min­i­mizes waste while enhanc­ing our lives.

Marilyn and Bill Redelmeir run Southbrook Vineyards in Niagara, it is Canada’s first organic cer­ti­fied vineyard.

Chickens freely roam among the vines feast­ing on bugs, sheep graze on intru­sive weeds, and the drop­pings from these happy farm work­ers fer­til­ize the soil. No need for pes­ti­cides or fer­til­iz­ers, the result is an organic, nat­ural wine. And after press­ing all those grapes, what to do with the tons of grape skins left over? Well, you could dump it or com­post it, or you could do like the Redelmeirs and cre­ate an orig­i­nal awe­some, organic and healthy prod­uct that is lit­er­ally squeezed from the fruits of your labours and call it Bioflavia.

Most of us know by now that many of the nutri­tive ben­e­fits in fruits and veg­eta­bles are found in their skins, so stop peel­ing your spuds, apples and car­rots! Grapes are no excep­tion, as the organic grape skin pow­der is packed with antiox­i­dants, con­tain­ing 11,000 Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity Units (ORAC) per 10 g serv­ing, not to men­tion 24% of your daily fibre needs.

Some of you may be old enough to remem­ber an ad cam­paign used by Welch’s sev­eral years ago: steam curl­ing over a pot of stew­ing grapes with a trust­wor­thy avun­cu­lar voice remark­ing some­thing like “We here at Welch’s fig­ured that there must be some flavour escap­ing in that steam, so we figger’d a way to return the flavour to the pot.”  Then they show the pot with a lid on it and a curly tube going from one end of the pot to the other, in which the steam is con­densed and returns the pre­cious grapey essence to the vat of jelly. Seriously. Even as a child who still believed in the tooth fairy, I stared at this unlikely con­trap­tion think­ing, “What a crock!”

There is no such sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief required in the man­u­fac­ture of Bioflavia. Basically the grape skins are dried and ground into a fine pow­der and pack­aged. Ta da! Next time you make a fruit smoothie, add a scoop of this stuff. It can be added to muffins, pan­cakes. There are lots of ways to incor­po­rate it into your diet? Have you tried this prod­uct yet? We’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

All nat­ural, organic, local to our region and deli­cious. A win for the ecol­ogy, a finan­cial win for Southbrook Vineyards, a win for health nuts. We’re gonna run out of wine at this rate!