A 20-year-old Olds College brewery student has won a prestigious business plan competition for an idea that makes use of excess brewer's grains.
Alex Villeneuve, a first-year brewmaster student, took first place in the TecEdmonton VenturePrize Business Competition this past Thursday.
For that, he received a $20,000 cheque. It's also his understanding he will also receive advice on how to build the business.
Villeneuve's idea is to utilize spent grains from the brewery process to grow high-protein mushrooms for restaurants, grocery and farmers markets.
The grain can also be refined to be sold to farmers as feed for their animals. Also, those grains can be used to clean up diesel and oil spills.
He's created a company -- Ceres Solutions Ltd. -- and is getting some help from the college, his dad and brother to build up the business.
Villeneuve and two other finalists had to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges – much like on Dragons' Den, the famous CBC TV show.
Villeneuve has some ideas about why he won.
“I think it was partially because I practised my presentation quite a few times. I'd included a lot of really valuable statistics,” he said.
He says the judges were also very interested in “how hands-on and tangible the project was.”
“My competition had brought in ideas for apps that hadn't quite been worked out yet,” he added. “One of my competitors had designed a fashion app which is a really cool idea. It has some awesome implications. But I think what the judges wanted to see was a project that was already in development.”
“I think the development with Olds College and it being a more physical, tangible project really helped out,” Villeneuve added.
“We kind of thought through all the stages and had a business plan with projected sales. Everybody from the college has been really supportive. We had a whole bunch of people from the college – the director and brewery coordinator, and the entrepreneurialship coordinator and some of the research scientists have been helping me out along the way.”
An Edmonton business consultant also helped him.
Villeneuve has some ideas on how he'll make use of the $20,000 prize.
“We're going to invest the money in more in-depth nutritional analysis. We want some really solid numbers that we can be able to give to farmers; some really tangible evidence with different types of grains as well as different species of mushrooms, so that's going to cost us quite a bit of money.
“We're going to do some oilfield remediation tests; some small-scale ones with toxic hydrocarbons to determine how it breaks them down.
“Then we're going to use some of the capital to start getting grains to our facility and scale it to capacity (full-scale production).
We've got the eight to 10 breweries that are already interested in entering into service agreements, so we'd use that capital to hire logistics companies to start (doing) some pickups for us. Then from there, we start going to capacity.”
He's hopeful he can take his products to market and begin making money in a couple of months. That's partly because he has just been accepted to a culinary school, which he'll be attending for two months.
“So instead of going right into sales, what we're going to do is make sure we have a really good quality in a lot of our seed stock and everything. That way, come the farmers market time – or in two months here -- we'll be able to hit the shelves. That's the plan, anyway,” he said.
Meanwhile, Villeneuve hopes to complete all the paperwork to be able to sell his products to distributors, etc.
“So we've got a lot on our plate,” he said.
"I think the development with Olds College and it being a more physical, tangible project really helped out." ALEX VILLENEUVEOLDS COLLEGE STUDENT
