“How do you build a business that actually regrows the world, and doesn’t just simply sustain it?”
In partnership with Employment and Social Development Canada, Startup Canada is celebrating and putting the spotlight on leading Canadian social innovators driving change in one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Startup Canada was pleased to sit down with Toni Desrosiers, Founder & CEO of Abeego to learn about their impact on SDG 12—Responsible Consumption and Production.
In 2008, Toni invented Abeego, the first beeswax food wrap—kickstarting a worldwide trend that spans hundreds of brands and product lines. She works to push the company beyond just being sustainable toward becoming a regenerative business. They’ve even found ways to repurpose production waste by turning scraps into twist ties and excess material into fire starters—something they call waste-generated resources.
Toni’s resilience, drive, and passion has not only pushed Abeego forward but has inspired other women entrepreneurs and social innovators across the country.
SC: In one sentence, what does Abeego do?
TD: Abeego keeps food alive for a food-secure world with our natural food wrap.
SC: How does your work advance SDG 12—Responsible Consumption and Production?
TD: Abeego is the first breathable food wrap to enter the market. Fresh, living food will stay alive, nutrient-dense, and edible much longer if it’s kept in a breathable material. We advance the work of responsible consumption by reducing food waste with our food wrap, on a consumer level.
We also advance responsible production by operating a near-zero production facility, which means that we’re using the minimum resources required to produce our product, and finding uses for any byproduct created in the process.
SC: What motivated you to build Abeego?
TD: I was practicing as a holistic nutritionist, and I recognized that when I opened my fridge—all my fresh fruits and vegetables were in breathable skins, peels, and rinds. I started to ask how we fell in love with airtight and transparent food wrap when it can’t be found anywhere in nature. I wanted to create a food wrap that nature would recognize using natural materials and adopting the natural properties of how nature’s already wrapped our food.
SC: What impact are you most proud of?
TD: I invented Abeego in 2008, and today beeswax food wrap is a worldwide trend. I think that’s remarkable. There’s beeswax food wrap popping up in every country around the world, and it has changed the way people think about storing, preserving, and keeping their fresh food alive longer.
SC: What inspires you to keep going?
TD: I feel like the work has just begun.
I would say the biggest motivating factor for me goes well beyond the idea of a food wrap, and the mission to keep food alive. What that means is helping people understand what living food is, what conditions it needs to stay alive the longest, and advancing our relationship to food to a more intimate relationship in which we put food back in our hands.
In the last 50 years, we’ve largely just let mass agriculture and mass industry take our right of food away, and provide it to us in grocery stores. Without the mass industries supporting us, we are food-insecure. I would like to help people understand that food is a human right, and it is accessible to all, and we can have it, we just have to take it back.
SC: What has been your biggest learning along the way?
TD: I‘ve always approached running my business with sustainability as a journey, not an immediate start point. I did this because when I was inventing Abeego, having the ultimate sustainable company based on the idealized—what is sustainable?—wasn’t actually sustainable for business. Had I tried to start there, I would never have been able to start my business.
So I’ve always approached it with sustainability as being the path to creating a great company, and improving along the way, and reiterating, and making things better, and finding new materials as a journey versus the end goal.
And sustainability changes, right? Sustainable goals change and you have to constantly be adapting and moving towards something bigger. So in the early days of Abeego, I was gentle with myself in understanding that I was doing everything I could do at the time with the resources that were available to me with the goal of continuously improving it.
SC: And now it’s more about asking—what more can you do based on having more resources?
TD: The end goal should never be just sustainability. The end goal should always be how do you build a regenerative business? How do you build a business that actually regrows the world, and doesn’t just simply sustain it?
SC: Wow. So how has being impact-driven helped you to persevere and thrive?
TD: I think being impact driven is good business. To be honest with you, I think that it’s the type of business people want to support. It’s the type of business people want to work for. In this day and age, it’s an absolutely mandatory part of your company to be finding impact; improving the world in some way. So for me, impact-driven has just felt like smart business.
Has it helped me persevere? Yeah! I care really deeply about why Abeego exists and who it impacts, and having that deep level of care with what I’m doing makes it impossible to quit. Because I know that the end goal of where I’m trying to take this company is so much bigger than where it stands today.
SC: What advice do you have for Canadian entrepreneurs looking to advance the Sustainable Development Goals with their businesses?
TD: My personal motto is; you must do something—especially when you can’t do everything. That ties into the idea of starting small; start biting off little pieces every single day and keep improving. If you wait until you can do everything you see to achieve your goal of sustainability—you’ll never start. And we need people who are starting and biting off piece, by piece, by piece every single day if we’re going to move to a more regenerative and sustainable world.
SC: Where can people go to learn more about your journey and organization?
TD: Abeego.com has a lot of information about Abeego and our brand. Certainly following us on Instagram will teach you a lot about why Abeego exists and how we stand to change the way the world saves its food. You can also follow me on Instagram, where I talk a little bit more about what I believe as far as a more regenerative, food-secure world.
SC: What is your big vision for Canada and the World over the next 20 years?
TD: My vision for Canada and the world is so massive that again, I feel like I need to deliver a bite-sized piece of it: I long for the day when people look at their front yards as farms and not front lawns. And that we start growing food right within our communities and taking that ownership of our food as a resource back into our own hands. That would be something I’d love to see.
SC: What do you think today’s entrepreneurs should be focused on for a better, brighter future?
TD: If I was to give young entrepreneurs something to focus their attention on today, I would tell them to go after the biggest, most developed industries in the world—and I’ll use my personal experience:
Abeego set out to disrupt the plastic wrap industry, and we did that specifically because the plastic wrap industry had largely matured. It wasn’t innovative, they weren’t doing anything cool; they really didn’t have anywhere to go from the simple sheet that they had been shoving down our throats for the last 50 years.
In my opinion, when an industry is considered too big to fail or too big to overcome, that’s exactly when they’re ripe for disruption.
Are you a disruptor? Join the Startup Canada Social Impact Network to gain access to social enterprise programming online and on-the-ground.