Local Foods

Ontario’s growing season doesn’t always line up with the academic year, but we’re committed to local food, during harvest and beyond. Thanks to a campus-based processing facility (built with funding from The Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation), we preserve Ontario-grown produce at peak freshness and serve it year-round.

Ontario’s growing season doesn’t always align with the academic year, so we found a solution: processing and preserving local produce at peak freshness.

With funding from the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation in 2012, we built a vegetable processing facility right on campus. This allows us to buy large volumes of Ontario-grown fruits and vegetables in season, process them in-house, and store them for use year-round.

Each summer, our team chops, blanches, freezes, and jars local ingredients - everything from broccoli and berries to garlic scapes and asparagus. These become staples in soups, sauces, pasta stations, and more. We also preserve condiments and toppings like spicy ketchup, corn salsa, pickles, and our signature smoked Roma tomato jam.

One highlight: we’ve frozen over 1,200lbs of University of Guelph’s Millennium asparagus for pasta bars, quiches, and soups. Our chefs also turn garlic scapes into aioli, and blast-freeze up to 100 flats of berries for catering compotes.

Our pickling program shines in the summer, using cucumbers from the Elmira Produce Auction Co-op and dill from the Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming. You’ll find the result, house-made pickles, at the 100 Mile Grille in Creelman Hall.

Our Partners

Our major supporting partners in this endeavour, with whom we secure the large volume of produce required, are the University of Guelph Research farms (Muck Crops, Vineland Station, and Simcoe Station), Don's Produce, Elmira Produce Auction Co-operative, and the Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming (GCUOF).