Coming up with one truly great idea is impressive. Turning that impressive idea into a real-world innovation requires not only the spark of inspiration but also a relentless drive to conduct research, build prototypes, test functionalities and refine processes—over and over again.
It’s the kind of single-minded commitment that’s on display across the city and all along the Toronto-Waterloo corridor, where solutions to problems big and small are being cooked up in university classrooms, hospital labs and start-up meeting rooms. Life-saving transplant technology, reusable 3D-printed soil, wearable robotics for kids with physical disabilities and gum that cleans your teeth are just a few of the breakthroughs in the pages ahead. What do they all have in common? The power to change lives for the better.
A mini drill that retrofits old buildings with green energy
1Buildings are the largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in Toronto, accounting for more than half of the city’s total emissions. The culprits: fossil fuels, such as gas, used for heating and cooling. Replacing them with geothermal energy can reduce a building’s carbon footprint by up to 70 per cent, but for that to happen, a 10-metre drill rig must dig boreholes to create pathways for heat exchange before construction. Working to change that is Thermacity, a local construction technology company. In 2023, it started developing a miniaturized driller small enough to fit into existing buildings—a significant step toward retrofitting older building stock.
Just two metres tall, the compact tool can drill boreholes from the lowest level of a parking garage. It uses a self-correcting remotely monitored system, which means it doesn’t require constant supervision by an operator, making it more efficient. The resulting geothermal energy can be coupled with a building’s wind and solar capabilities, unlocking the possibility for city-wide decarbonization.
Patents are pending for both the drill and its steering system, but Thermacity has already completed engineering studies for Toronto Western Hospital and Exhibition Place, along with more than 70 other properties across Canada, including office spaces, condo buildings, community centres and data centres.
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A high-speed EV charger that doesn’t trash the power grid
2Call it an electric hat trick. When the energy storage company Jule decided to work on scaling the adoption of electric vehicles, it focused on three problems plaguing the industry. First up was minimizing the impact of EVs on the power grid. Second was ensuring easy access to fast charging stations, particularly in remote areas. And finally, there was the need for chargers that could withstand extreme weather, like frigid Canadian winters.
Jule’s solution: an EV charger that uses an integrated battery energy storage system to slowly and steadily draw from the grid—a process known as a trickle charge. A Level 3 EV charger (the most powerful kind), Jule’s technology can fully power a car battery in less than half an hour, adding roughly 10 to 20 kilometres of range per minute depending on the make and model.
And what of the cold weather that can degrade Jule’s battery system? With help from researchers at U of T, the company has implemented thermal management tools that provide appropriate levels of heating or cooling as needed. Now at more than 40 locations in Canada and the US, Jule’s technology will be deployed to 150 more sites across North America over the next two years.
3A drug’s formulation—which includes the inactive ingredients that deliver the drug to the target site in the body at the right dose and time—is just as important as the drug itself. “We often use the analogy that the drug is the passenger and the formulation is the plane,” says Christine Allen, the CEO and co-founder Intrepid Labs. “No matter how important the passenger is, they won’t get to where they need to go without the right vehicle.” The catch: traditional formulation development requires many rounds of slow, manual trial-and-error experimentation.
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Intrepid Labs, founded in 2023, has developed a platform called Valiant to exponentially speed up that process. Valiant proposes new formulation options using AI-driven predictions, then gets robots to execute experiments based on those predictions. The results are fed back into the platform, which updates its models before suggesting a new batch of experiments.
It’s an adaptive, efficient approach that’s very different from the usual experimental designs. In traditional drug development, just the formulation work can span months or years. Plus, research and pre-clinical formulation efforts can cost millions, depending on a project’s complexity. Valiant, however, can make rapid progress using minimal amounts of drug material and maximizing learning from every sample.
Intrepid Labs is currently running 11 projects with nine partners—which means tens of thousands of unique formulations are being designed. “Nearly 50 per cent of drugs in clinical development fail because of poor formulation,” says Allen. “We want to change that.”
Tiny homes that can be built in 72 hours
4Modular tiny homes can take several months to build, what with fabrication, transportation, craning and construction on-site. But Tinybox Systems, which launched in 2022, developed an IKEA-esque system that can reduce build time to less than two weeks—with some models taking as little as 72 hours. “Faster build times also lower financing and labour costs,” explains co-founder Charlie Frise, making his model one possible solution for housing affordability.
Energy efficient with a small footprint and off-grid capabilities, Tinyboxes are particularly well suited for rural and remote areas. In 2025, the company completed half a dozen builds, including a bunkie in Muskoka and an outdoor spa in Keswick. It’s also working on a pilot project with the local government in Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, to set up a space for travelling workers and a building for mechanical equipment. Below, a closer look at Tinybox Systems’ big idea.
The Topper
The Tinybox’s metal roofing has a considerable lifespan—roughly double that of a standard shingled roof. Plus, the metal performs well in harsh climates and requires minimal maintenance. It’s also recyclable and compatible with solar panels.
The Exterior
Several sidings are available, including fibre cement, engineered wood and a mirrored option. Cedar is among the most popular and environmentally friendly choices, and it’s responsibly sourced in Canada.
The Power Source
Some Tinyboxes come with a solar system to help power lighting, appliances, ventilation and charging devices. They can be paired with a battery for off-grid living.
The Heating and Cooling
Tinyboxes come equipped with an energy recovery ventilator that exchanges stale indoor air with fresh outdoor air while transferring heat between the two. This reduces heating and cooling loads, lowering overall energy use and emissions.
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The Shell
Vacuum insulation panels made from a foam core enclosed in steel have an airtight sealed centre. They drastically reduce heat transfer and insulate 10 times better than traditional walls. The panels are designed to resist rot, rodents and fire and are a fraction of the thickness of normal walls.
The Transport
The components of the Tinybox—including the panelled walls, the modular steel frames and the knock-down furniture (Murphy beds that double as desks, for example)—can be efficiently flat-packed. This eliminates the need for oversized loads, cranes and special transport permits, plus each individual component is light enough for two people to carry by hand.
A robot that finds lymph nodes in cancer tissues
5When Covid hit, Saumik Biswas was suddenly shut out of conducting research in hospitals. So he and his team—all members of the medical innovation fellowship at Western University—held hundreds of virtual interviews with hospital staff around the world to figure out which of the many challenges they faced most needed solving. After weighing criteria such as clinical impact, technical feasibility and economic viability, one problem rose to the top for pathologists: lymph node screening in cancer care.
The process of searching for and assessing lymph nodes in excised cancer tissues has remained largely unchanged for a century—despite the key role it plays in accurately determining a patient’s cancer stage and appropriate treatment. Pathologists are still manually feeling for firm areas in the tissue and visually assessing it, a labour-intensive task, research suggests, that can suck up 1,500 hours of a single lab staffer’s time each year. Critically, this approach is also prone to error and can miss more than 50 per cent of nodes.
In 2021, Biswas co-founded Tenomix, the company behind the Lymphonator—his solution to automating the manual lymph node screening process. The device uses robotics, ultrasound imaging and AI to scan excised cancer tissue specimens and identify lymph nodes. Once they’re detected, the software directs a robot to mark the spot, generating a map to help guide pathology staff.
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After beta-testing the Lymphonator with the University Hospital in London, Ontario, and the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, the team was able to reduce time spent on lymph node searching by 50 to 75 per cent. “This isn’t about replacing expertise in the lab,” explains Biswas. “It’s about giving pathology teams everywhere better tools so there’s less strain on them and greater confidence in the results they deliver.” His next hurdle: launching a commercial version of the Lymphonator by 2027.
A water purification powder that harnesses the power of the sun
6More than two billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water, and up to 80 per cent of illnesses in the developing world are linked to inadequate water and sanitation. Diana Virgovicova, the CEO and founder of cleantech start-up Xatoms, is working to change that.
What inspired you to make clean water your mission?
When I was 14, my mom and I took a backpacking trip to India. That was the first time I saw water pollution: rivers that were entirely black and children getting sick as a result. When I returned home to Slovakia, I was determined to do something about it. I contacted a professor who was working in water purification and eventually became involved in research focused on discovering new materials to purify water using sunlight. That’s the quantum chemistry piece behind Xatoms and the work that we do.
You’re talking to a layperson. Walk me through what makes your work special.
Our product is a powder that you put into contaminated water. When it’s exposed to sunlight or another visible light source, the powder reacts with the H2O molecule and attacks the contaminant—viruses, bacteria, chemical pollutants. Within minutes, the water is clean. The second piece of the puzzle is AI, which I became interested in when I came to Toronto to study computer engineering. Quantum chemistry, enabled by AI, allows us to create the necessary purifying compound, running through all the possibilities to identify the correct one to deal with different contaminants.
What are some of your current projects?
We launched a pilot with a filtration company in Texas and another with a community in Kenya. We are in the early stages of working with Indigenous communities in Northern Ontario. Factories contaminating our water is a big problem in North America and elsewhere, so we’re focusing on industrial water supply. For example, we are working with a textile manufacturer in Georgia that uses one million litres of water every day that can’t be recycled. You’ve said that contaminated water disproportionately affects women and girls.
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How so?
According to UNICEF, women and girls around the world spend a combined 200 million hours every day searching for clean water, often while their brothers are in school. In most places in Canada, we are fortunate to have clean tap water, but that is obviously not the case in so many other places.
A heart-failure app that monitors patients remotely
7Developed by a team at UHN, Medly transforms a cardiac patient’s smartphone or watch into an easy-to-use monitoring system. Patients record their daily vitals, such as weight, blood pressure and heart rate, and answer questions about their symptoms. The app then analyzes the data in real time and alerts the health care team—who also have access to the patient’s history and lab results—to notable changes or potential problems.
Created to help people living with heart failure get care before they land in emergency, the Medly program has since expanded beyond Toronto to nearly 40 underserved Indigenous communities in Northern Ontario. Up next: UHN recently partnered with the digital health company Vitall Intelligence to scale the platform for use across Canada and abroad.
8Autonomous indoor delivery robots are a common sight in Asia, where “smart” elevators allow the bots to interface with them. But, in North America, the elevators in our multi-storey hotels, condos and hospitals aren’t designed with bots in mind.
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Instead of looking at costly and time-consuming retrofits, the team at 3E8 Robotics went back to basics: they built a bot that could press buttons. Equipped with cameras and a robotic arm, their creation, Elly, is capable of locating and selecting floor numbers regardless of the elevator’s layout, lighting or panel design.
The company’s co-founders, who relocated to California last year, have demoed Elly in nine San Francisco high-rise condos and three hotels, with a handful of pilot projects confirmed for 2026.
9For anyone who’s ever fibbed about how often they brush, Toothpod has a solution. The start-up’s eponymous chewable tablet is meant to act as an oral health stand-in when toothpaste and a toothbrush won’t happen—whether it’s because you’re an avid camper, a frequent traveller, an apathetic teenager or just forgetful.
The minty “smart gum” contains hydroxyapatite (a calcium that helps re-mineralize teeth and rebuild enamel), the antioxidant resveratrol, and magnolia bark to decrease bacteria and inflammation. The brainchild of two young U of T grads, Toothpod has already attracted big-name investors including tech entrepreneur Michele Romanow and former AstraZeneca Canada CEO Michael Cloutier. With support from Harvard Dentistry and the Dental Care Alliance, a Florida-based group with more than 400 clinics across the States, Toothpod is slated for a widespread US rollout later this year.
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Transplant devices that grow the lung donor pool
10One of UHN’s trademark innovations, the Toronto Ex-Vivo Lung Perfusion System—known as EVLP—keeps potential donor lungs working outside the body by maintaining a temperature of 37 degrees and piping in nutrients. Once the organs are stable, specialists can properly assess and even repair them, lowering the rates of rejection following a transplant.
Since 2022, Traferox Technologies, a Mississauga-based company, has commercialized two devices based on EVLP to help patients around the world. The XºPort Lung Preservation System, which replaces crude ice storage with a portable insulated cooler, keeps the organs safe during transport. They are then transferred to the TorEx, which allows doctors to properly determine the lungs’ viability, leading to greater confidence in the results—and an expansion of the donor pool.
An AI-curated playlist that reduces anxiety
11There’s easy listening and then there’s music that makes life easier—or at least a little less stressful. Developed through TMU, the digital health start-up Lucid is marrying AI and tunes to make medicine. The company’s Vibe app asks users to identify their current state (Tense? Sad? Bored?). Then, using their device’s camera to gauge facial reactions, it creates an AI-curated playlist to help shift their mood.
A recent clinical trial conducted by Lucid’s founders showed that 24 minutes of this specially designed music paired with auditory beat stimulation—which uses two slightly different frequency tones—can significantly reduce anxiety.
Footwear made from plants, not plastic
12When it comes to reducing the world’s carbon footprint, shoes are a good place to start. The footwear industry produces 24 billion new pairs annually—and almost all of them end up in landfills. Your favourite pair of sneakers or booties will eventually fray to the point of becoming unwearable, but the polyurethane found in their soles will take much, much longer to biodegrade.
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That’s where Evoco comes in. The cleantech company’s patented Fates insoles are made from plant residue and waste materials—which reduces carbon emissions by up to 70 per cent and eliminates the harmful forever chemicals that make regular foam soles a planetary no-no.
Since incorporating in 2017, Evoco has partnered with industry giants such as Vans, Lacoste and Michael Kors, collaborations that prove sustainability doesn’t have to skimp on style. “Our product needs to look as cool and work as well as the previous offering,” says Evoco CEO Jason Robinson, a chemical engineer who founded the start-up with his wife and fellow engineering grad, Natalie Ashdown, out of their Roncesvalles apartment. “It probably wasn’t the safest place to be running chemistry experiments,” he jokes of the early days.
Today, Evoco’s labs are located in the MaRS Discovery District, where research on future applications in fashion, home furnishings and the automotive industry is ongoing. Next out of the gate: a plant-based, cost-effective pleather.
Illustration by Ryan Snook
Wearable robotics for kids with physical disabilities
13Manmeet Maggu once dreamed of creating a real-life Iron Man. Now his robo-tech is giving kids with movement disorders the chance to walk.
“I always knew I wanted to be an engineer. When I was little, I would break apart my toys just to see if I could put them back together. In my third year in the mechatronics program at the University of Waterloo, my friend Rahul Udasi and I decided to work on an exoskeleton arm—a wearable robotic device that fits over a regular arm and enhances its strength and movement. Iron Man had just come out, and all the engineering geeks were trying to create bionic body parts.
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“During winter break, I went to India to visit family, including my nephew Praneit, who was three years old at the time and had been born with cerebral palsy. His doctors said he would never walk, but his dad was convinced that a solution could be found. As we talked it through, I thought, Instead of turning humans into Marvel superheroes, why not focus on tech—an exoskeleton suit—that would give kids like Praneit a chance to walk?
“Praneit had a walker that is commonly used by many children with mobility disabilities, made by a company called Rifton. Rather than starting from scratch, we decided to purchase that same walker and design our robotics system around it. I will never forget watching Praneit take his first steps using our prototype. He is non-verbal, but the glee on his face was evident and definitely inspired us to keep working out the kinks.
“Since we released Trexo in 2019, it has helped bring that same joy and confidence to more than 400 users. Most of our clients have cerebral palsy, but the device works for people with other genetic conditions or spinal cord injuries that make walking impossible. I’ve always prioritized patient needs, but as a robotics nerd, I was often consumed by the engineering challenges of our product. The feedback from our customers reminds me that mobility can bring dignity and independence. That is what I’m most proud of.
“We recently launched in Australia, and this summer we’ll be in Europe; hopefully the US isn’t far off. And there’s more work to be done. We want to eventually serve the adult market, but for now we’re focusing on pushing provincial governments to include the Trexo under the assisted devices program. That way a Trexo, which costs roughly $40,000, would get the same health coverage as a wheelchair. We want our product to be accessible, not a luxury item.”
AI that trains long-haul trucks to drive themselves
14Those who teach actually can do, it turns out. For the past decade, Raquel Urtasun, a computer science professor at U of T, has balanced academia with AI industry jobs. She was the chief scientist at Uber’s advanced technologies group from 2017 to 2021, when she left to launch Waabi, a self-driving trucking start-up that rapidly pulled ahead of its competition.
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While other companies were training physical fleets on programs that required extensive time on the road, Urtasun and her team used generative AI to create an advanced road-condition simulator. Known as Waabi World, it’s a virtual school for training and testing the company’s autonomous Waabi Driver. Cutting down on the cost and risk of real-world testing enabled Waabi to raise $200 million in a 2024 funding round and attract such investors as Uber, Khosla, OMERS Ventures, BDC Capital and Geoffrey Hinton.
After partnering with Uber Freight to haul autonomous loads between Dallas and Houston, Waabi opened a headquarters in Texas to leverage the state’s high volumes of transport and minimal weather complications. Current testing on real roads still employs a safety driver, but Urtasun has set the stage for Waabi to go entirely autonomous in the near future.
Big rigs are the logical launch pad for the company: the industry is plagued by both labour costs and shortages yet can also offer a significant ROI since transport runs 24/7. They are not, however, Waabi’s sole focus: in January, Urtasun announced a soon-to-launch fleet of robo-taxis.
Generative AI is primed to make the shift from digital applications like ChatGPT to physical systems like big rigs—plus robotic interventions in everything from health care to home maintenance. Urtasun recently predicted that, a decade down the road, robots will be everywhere. She didn’t say that many of them would be Waabi-branded, but she didn’t have to.
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Reusable 3D-printed soil for indoor farming
15Indoor farming is having a moment as countries look to counter the effects of extreme weather and address sustainability needs. One of the challenges: standard hydroponic growth materials are single use and high in carbon emissions. A solution: Lyrata’s reusable and energy-efficient 3D-printed smart soil, created by U of T engineering grad Adnan Sharif.
Is it true that you came up with the idea to create “smart” soil because you kept killing your plants?
My mentor during my undergrad at U of T was researching plant immune systems, and I was tasked with caring for some of the plants involved in her experiments. I wanted to spend less time at school because I was a 20-year-old kid, so I was looking for a way that the plants could hold water for a week. I dug into the existing research and landed on 3D-printed soil. That was the start of our company, Lyrata.
What are the benefits of 3D-printed soil, beyond securing more free time for undergrads?
The most popular material in indoor hydroponic farming is rockwool, which is made from melted rocks, instead of soil. Rockwool is more easily controlled than regular soil, but there is a significant environmental cost. It typically ends up in landfills. It also requires a huge amount of energy to heat, whereas Lyrata’s smart soil is made from recyclable, plant-based biopolymers—polylactic acid sourced from corn, specifically—and is up to 65 times less carbon intensive.
And your product could potentially replace rockwool cubes?
Theoretically, yes, but there are more than a billion rockwool cubes in use. Until recently, we have been building and selling self-contained farms. There is one installed at Casa Loma, in partnership with Liberty Entertainment Group, to produce herbs and edible flowers for restaurants. And there are two at U of T that grow most of the university’s lettuce. We have decided, however, that it makes more sense to sell our product to the companies that manufacture urban farming equipment. So now we have a partnership with a Toronto company called Just Vertical and another called Plantaform, in Quebec. We’re targeting companies that already use rockwool to get them to switch to our product.
Beyond addressing the carbon footprint factor, what else does Lyrata do?
Our product ties into food sovereignty, which is a big focus right now given global political tensions. Canada, with its access to clean and cheap energy, is well positioned to build greater agricultural self-reliance, and our soil can be a big part of that.
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Opioid-free pain relief
16Molly Shoichet likes to think of her company’s injectable hydrogel as the FedEx of drug delivery. “We provide the packaging and deliver the things where they need to be and when they need to be there,” she says. It’s an apt comparison. AmacaThera’s hydrogel surrounds and protects a drug as it enters the body, allowing for both localized and time-released delivery—especially useful when it comes to post-surgical pain management.
Currently, when doctors make incisions, the pain medication that’s injected doesn’t last more than a day. Longer-lasting opioids are extremely effective at relieving pain but come with significant addiction risks. More than 50,000 Canadians have died from opioid-related causes in the past decade—a crisis that was only starting to become clear when Shoichet, a chemical engineering prof at U of T, co-founded AmacaThera with her former student Mike Cooke. They’d heard from surgeons and anesthesiologists about the need for an alternative, and that’s what their product provides: the protective packaging and timed release extends the life of post-op pain meds for several days, potentially eliminating the need for opioids altogether. “It appealed to us that our product fulfills an unmet medical need and an unmet societal need,” says Shoichet.
In late 2024, AmacaThera completed successful safety testing. Later this year, it will target post-op patients with surgical incisions. In the meantime, a $312-million partnership with the US pharma company Pacira will fund preparations for a commercial launch. Down the line, Shoichet and Cooke want to use their innovation—which is compatible with myriad therapeutic agents, including proteins and antibodies—to move beyond pain management into other forms of treatment.
Automated road patrols that help repair city streets
17Visiting athletes, politicians and celebrities have complained about our city’s traffic situation—once Toronto the Good, we’re now Toronto the Good lord, have you seen the gridlock on the Gardiner? Congestion is stealing our time (199 hours a year per driver), our money ($11 billion in forfeited productivity for the city) and our sanity. As anyone who has gotten behind the wheel knows, poor road infrastructure is at least partly to blame.
When Emil Sylvester Ramos immigrated to Toronto from the Philippines in 2017, he hoped he’d seen his last gaping pothole. But it turned out that the roads in his new home were also in glaring disrepair. So Ramos, an architecture grad committed to building smarter cities, began searching for solutions. The result, Iris, is an AI-enabled road inspection system that identifies and manages repair needs in real time.
More efficient than having city inspectors drive around and manually register potential problems, Iris works with dashcams attached to city-owned vehicles such as TTC buses, garbage trucks and street sweepers. The company’s software can also prioritize what urgently needs to be addressed—an expanding crack in the pavement, a missing traffic sign—and issue work orders accordingly, all while managing privacy concerns by redacting faces and licence plates as the vehicles move along.
Iris’s system is currently being used in Brantford, Hamilton, Vaughan and Grey County; in the latter, it has cut road inspection costs by 50 per cent. Last year, as part of its expansion plans, the company opened US headquarters in Seattle, and it’s now working on new partnerships in Italy, Spain, Aruba and Saudi Arabia.
Plant-based salmon that actually tastes like salmon
18Chris Bryson swears that his company’s star product—a faux-salmon fillet—is getting closer and closer to the real thing. And the founder of food tech outfit New School Foods has buy-in from more than 100 restaurants across Canada and the US, including Gia in Trinity-Bellwoods, Joni at the Park Hyatt Toronto and the Hazelton Hotel’s One. The start-up’s key innovation is a patented freezing technology that produces an authentic texture by imitating the muscle fibres in salmon. (Steak and bone-in ribs are still in the R&D stage.) Here, a breakdown of what goes into a convincing dupe.
The Smell and the Taste
The scent and flavour that people think of when they think of salmon are tied up, in part, with oceanic items such as algae. New School Foods aims to capture that aquatic je ne sais quoi, along with shades of brine and butter, using algae oil and other ingredients.
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The Look
Achieving salmon’s trademark hue was non-negotiable, so fillets are coloured with paprika and tomato. The wavy white lines of muscle tissue in real cuts of the fish are mimicked via a purpose-built machine that deposits a gel made of seaweed extract and liquid oil into what will become the orangey-pink fillet.
The Texture
One of the main advantages of NSF’s salmon is that it comes raw and can be prepped following the same processes as regular fish. “A lot of plant-based proteins are precooked, but people want that feeling of transition when they prepare a piece of fish,” says Bryson. Through the process of denaturizing—a molecular shift that alters physical texture—NSF’s fillets transform from raw and translucent to cooked and opaque.
The Flake
When the faux salmon is cooked, its white lines melt while the rest of the fillet remains heat-stable. This allows for that “fall apart” effect when you put a fork to it.
The Benefits
Just like the real fish, NSF’s salmon contains heart-healthy Omega-3s as well as iron. Conspicuously and blissfully absent: microplastics and mercury.
A robot that kills weeds with electricity
19People talk about lightning-bolt moments to describe sudden divine inspiration, but robotics engineer David Tao’s actual inspiration was lightning. His company’s fleet of agro-bots, which employ high-voltage electricity to attack weeds, could eventually replace herbicides in commercial farming.
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“Early in the pandemic, I visited a friend on his carrot farm in Chatham, and he was telling me all about his epic battle with weeds. Herbicides have been the standard in weed control for more than 75 years, but increasingly weeds are developing a resistance. Similar to what’s happened with viruses, it’s almost like we have a new class of immune superweeds. That got us wondering about alternative solutions, and we landed on electricity. Think about what happens when plants get zapped by lightning during a storm—immediate annihilation. So why not use high-voltage electricity to attack weeds?
“Our machine is a robotic arm that can either operate autonomously or get pulled by a tractor. Simply put, it uses computer vision and AI to differentiate between weeds and crops. It can take out a weed as small as my thumb or as big as me without endangering the crop plant, which has a natural wax coating that acts as a barrier against the volts.
“Estimates from the Ministry of Agriculture suggest that ineffective weeding can decrease the yield of a farm by 80 per cent, so the potential to make a difference is significant. There are other advantages to robots too. Herbicides have a known impact on the health of not just the soil but the people around it—more pollution, higher cancer rates. Then there’s the labour question: replacing human work with robots is often seen as a bad thing, but in this case we’re talking about back-breaking and sometimes dangerous work. From a cost perspective, robots could free growers from the massive corporations that sell marked-up GMO-modified seeds that are resistant only to the same company’s proprietary herbicide.
“The majority of our clients are Canadian farmers who have replaced 95 per cent of their weeding crews and 99 per cent of their pesticide use with our product. We’ve started testing in Arizona and California, where the growing seasons are longer than here. In the history of agriculture, there have been only a couple of key inflection points: first the tractor, then herbicides. We believe high-voltage weed control is the next big one.”
A greener, safer, super-fly dog food
20A dog mom with a PhD in chemical engineering and applied chemistry, Sofia Bonilla has thought a lot about the quality of standard-issue pet food and its significant carbon footprint. So she decided to invent a sustainable alternative: an insect-based product that’s pup-approved.
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Your company, Alt-Pro Advantage, aims to disrupt the pet food industry. What’s wrong with regular kibble?
Most of the proteins in regular dog food come from chicken or beef, which are common food allergens for a lot of pets. And from an environmental perspective, we know that 26 per cent of global greenhouse gases come from food emissions and roughly 25 per cent of meat in North America is used to feed pets. That opens up a huge opportunity to make a difference.
The global pet food market is valued at $180 billion. It doesn’t seem like most animals are just getting chicken or beef—pet food has gone seriously gourmet in recent years.
That’s what we call the humanization of pet food. People want to give their dogs the very best, and a lot of marketing pushes the idea that it needs to be as close to human food as possible. I get it—our dog, Snoofy, is like our child. But pets and humans have very different dietary requirements. Pets need to consume protein, but there is no reason that protein has to come from chicken. In fact, there are safety issues involved there, if you think about recent salmonella or avian flu outbreaks. So Alt-Pro Advantage is made from insects.
How does that work from a nutritional standpoint?
We chose insects to replace animal ingredients because they are a complete protein and have a similar amino acid profile to chicken. We experimented with mealworms and crickets but ultimately opted to use black soldier flies. They check all the important nutritional boxes while also being available and already approved by regulatory bodies in North America and Europe. How do they taste? Sort of nutty, like a seed. I don’t think humans in this part of the world will be dining on them any time soon, but that’s sort of the point. Pets don’t have the same cultural and social considerations around food that we do.
That’s a nice way of saying that dogs aren’t food snobs. Does Snoofy like your product?
Oh definitely. He was our tester all along. What’s really funny is that I tend to pick up other insect-based products whenever I see them, but Snoofy really prefers our brand. Maybe he’s just extremely loyal.
This feature appears in the March 2026 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.
