Funding For Halifax Companies Creating Innovative Natural Products
HALIFAX—Two young Halifax companies will get a funding boost from an organization dedicated to supporting the development of natural products in Canada.
Impactful Health Research and Development and Smallfood were among ten companies to receive support through Natural Products Canada’s commercialization programs.
Natural Products Canada is a not-for-profit organization focused on building and supporting Canada’s Natural Product Innovation Cluster. The cluster is a partnership between the government, research institutions, investors, and businesses.
NPS supports the cluster by offering a suite of “commercialization programs” that aim to help companies and researchers advance natural products with high potential.
Through those programs, NPS has committed to giving Smallfood about $50,000 and Impactful Health $250,000.
Mina Mekhail is the CEO of Impactful Health. He says the funding “was critical” for the company at this stage of its growth.
Impactful Health is developing sustainable packaging that extends the shelf life of fresh foods like fish. It comes in the form of an anti-bacterial film applied to biodegradable plastic.
Right now, the company can only produce the product on a small scale. The funding from RNP will help the company scale up its production.
“And that does a whole bunch of things for us. One, is it de-risks the process because if you can prove the scalability of the process—that’s the middle step between what we’re doing now and largescale production,” he says.
Better production also allows the company to take part in more pilot projects, which help bring the product to market.
Already, Mekhail says, Impactful Health is taking part in pilots with Mitsubishi Chemical, as well as a major fish processing company and major retailer he can’t publicly name.
“We’re still a small company but we’re developing something that could have a global impact,” Mekhail says.
Mekhail says the whole team at Impactful Health is very “mission-driven” and that reducing food waste is a deeply personal issue for him.
“I think it’s somehow ingrained in us that food is something that is valuable and it shouldn’t be wasted,” he says.
“It’s very personal for me. Even at our own house, I’m very anti-throwing out food as much as possible.” He admits he often finds himself eating the scraps left by his two-year-old to save it from going to waste.
Founding Impactful Health gives him a chance to create food waste solutions on a much larger scale.
Mekhail says Impactful Health will spend the next year or so scaling its operation and taking part in more pilot projects.
If all goes well, he predicts the company will make a commercial push early next year.
Trevor Nichols is the associate editor of Huddle, based in Halifax. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].