Northern Biscuit Supports Local Economy While Ensuring Freshest Ingredients
For over 30 years, Northern Biscuit has been slowly baking their biscuits using only the freshest local ingredients. Sourcing locally has many benefits:
- Source finest natural ingredients from local Canadian farmers and businesses
- Sourcing local limits travel time of ingredients
- Helps reduce carbon footprint
- Supports local economy
- Ensures their ingredients are the freshest they can be
Northern Biscuit’s Bullfrog Power
Northern Biscuit has partnered with Bullfrog Power, Canada’s leading green energy provider, to offset their energy use while baking. Bullfrog power uses clean, renewable sources to supply power to the grid with so many benefits:
- High-impact renewable energy solutions for businesses
- Have helped displace more than 2 million tonnes of carbon emissions
- Displacing emssions puts renewable energy onto the system to displace the polluting energy used
- Supports new clean energy sources like wind and solar farms, low-impact hydro projects, and green natural gas producers
- Green energy products make it easy to meet sustainability goals
- Procure renewable power from wind, solar, and low-impact hydro sources
- Choose low-carbon fuel for fleets and vehicles
Northern Biscuit’s 100% Compostable Packaging
Northern Biscuit treats, since day one, have been delivered in brown bags. Today, they still are:
- Plant-based liner
- Brown kraft paper bags
- 100% compostable in every aspect
- Keep biscuits fresh and crunchy
- 30 years and counting of zero plastic in their packaging
- Reduce carbon foot print
Northern Biscuit Zero Waste Repurposes Waste to Steam
Northern Biscuit is proud to be a Zero Waste company for many reasons:
- They repurpose waste to steam used by a paper plant
- Zero waste to landfill bakery
- Remove waste from environment
- Offsets their use of paper packaging
- Reduce carbon foot print
Over 30 Years of Industry-Changing Excellence
In 1991, Northern Biscuit Founder Patricia Grillo, couldn’t find a dog biscuit that her picky American Eskimo puppy would eat. On top of that, she also couldn’t find a healthy, wholesome, biscuit that wasn’t full of artificial ingredients. Inspired by all of this, and with two toddlers at her feet, Patricia rolled up her sleeves and got to work.
As someone who was already buying only fresh ingredients at her local farmers market and making all of her baby foods and family meals from scratch, Patricia decided she would try making a healthy biscuit for their dog. After spending months working out the perfect dog treat, she knew she had a winner when she would find her pup waiting eagerly by the treat cupboard. Soon, neighboring dogs were lined up eagerly awaiting their next “Patricia-baked treat”! Word continued to spread as people and dogs were falling deeply in love with these hand-crafted, human-grade, limited-ingredient, all-natural, slow-baked dog biscuits.
The demand grew very rapidly and they had to figure out a way to handle the large quantities while still providing the same wholesome biscuits everyone had grown to love and trust. With her husband Nick working at her side, together they turned their apartment into a bakery complete with a hand-held mixer, small meat grinder, and extra oven racks for their electric oven. In addition, their son’s bedroom was converted to a walk-in cooler and dining and living rooms were now housing drying racks. With the help of family and friends, they were able to keep up with the large demand for their amazing biscuits.
Every Saturday Patricia, her husband, and their two toddlers would head out at 4am and set up their table at the local St. Jacobs Farmers Market. Demand continued to grow and, eventually, they were able to get their Northern Biscuits bags on the shelves in a store specializing in organic, natural baked goods. Shortly after this, they started getting calls from pet food stores wanting the “new Northern Biscuits”. With undying passion, tenacity, and a whole lot of patience… one store at a time, Northern Biscuit became a household staple.
Today, over 30 years after their passionate beginnings, you will still find the same healthy, love-filled biscuits inside the same eco-friendly Northern Biscuits bags….the only difference is that, now, they have their living room back.
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