THUNDER BAY — Culinary students in Thunder Bay are helping to feed the city and getting a valuable educational experience at the same time.
Students are cooking up large-batch prepared meals for the community through a partnership between Confederation College and the Regional Food Distribution Association (RFDA). The partnership is in its second year.
The resulting meals help feed local residents and the students learn how to cook in the large qualities needed for institutional kitchens, a win-win situation.
“The students last year had an amazing experience, said Richard Gemmill, dean for the school of business, hospitality and media arts at Confederation College.
"They helped produce over 18,000 meals for the community through the generous donation of products from the RFDA. They really came together as a unit, as a team, to produce all those meals. They had an amazing experience, and I think the first six weeks of this new cohort of students are having that same experience.”
The Molson Foundation announced on Tuesday that they are donating $25,000 to the ongoing partnership.
Gemmill said the hope is to use the funds to help offset supplementary costs in developing and delivering meals with the RFDA.
“Part of the challenge with this type of partnership is, when Tanner (Harris) and the folks at the RFDA get a donation, they might get 400 pounds of ground beef. Well, what can we turn that ground beef into. Maybe we want to make shepherd's pie.
“To make shepherd's pie, we need to get potatoes and carrots and stock and all of those other things to help support the meal,” he said.
The typical culinary management student focuses on skills to be employable in the restaurant business, Gemmill said.
“There's also a huge need within what we call an industrial or an institutional type of cooking, so batch cooking large production. I don't think a lot of students recognize or are exposed to that type of cooking normally in most programs.
“We think it's a really great thing for our students to be exposed to, and now we're going to see graduates going out and working for folks like Tanner and the RFDA or at the hospital or a long-term care facility,” he said.
Tanner Harris, food service manager at the RFDA, is a graduate of the culinary program at Confederation College.
“When I was in this program many years ago, they didn't have the batch cooking program. I know they were talking about it and it took a while to get to this stage. I was actually working in an institution at the time and this would have been really beneficial to me to learn how to cook in large quantities.
“My majority of my career has been in hospitals and long-term care homes. I really see the benefit of this program in those parts of the industries.”
Harris said this partnership also allows the program’s students to be creative.
“Getting the students to scratch their heads and think of what they can do with this product that's kind of unique to be able to use. That's one of the nice things, is seeing this all this come together.”
The bulk food the students prepare goes right back to the RFDA for their feeding programs and food banks in the city.
As the partnership continues, Harris said the hope is to expand out and create more meals and get them out to communities in the north.
“Because it's all frozen food, that would be the biggest challenge is, how do we get frozen food up to the north.
“We're able to already send lots of self-stable, non-perishables up to these communities, but making sure that transportation has freezer space as well as the destination has somewhere to hold it. That would be one of the biggest challenges of getting this food up to these communities, but we are in the works of trying to make that that happen,” Harris said.
In 2026, Harris said they plan to at least double the amount of food they’re producing now, and are hopeful to serve the whole region.
