Eating Local
Carleton Dining loves supporting the local food community by sourcing ingredients from farmers and artisans in the Ottawa and Gatineau region. You can find products from these local businesses on campus daily! To learn more about the producers from the community who supply Carleton Dining with ingredients, check out our Local Food page.
Rideau Pines Farm
Location: North Gower, ON
Distance from Campus: 20km
Rideau Pines Farm, located about thirty minutes south of campus, is beloved by restaurants across the city for supplying some of the most high-quality produce in Ottawa. Founded in 1980 by John Vandenberg, the farm began by growing berries, but has since been transformed to cultivate a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, and seeds. Today, John’s son, Matt Vandenberg, manages the farm and is passionate about fostering a local food network in Ottawa. You can look forward to lots of products from Rideau Pines in the caf this year, including fresh strawberries just as the semester starts and savory squash as we enter autumn.
Equator Coffee Roasters
Location: Almonte, ON
Distance from Campus: 50km
We are brewing up some local favorites in the caf this year, including Fair Trade blends from Equator Coffee Roasters! Founded in 1998 by Craig and Amber Hall in Almonte, ON, Equator’s business values have always been focused on making a difference globally and in the community by roasting, delivering, and serving 100% fair trade, organic coffee. The name Equator also reflects those values: to ‘Equate’ the benefit of drinking coffee past just the consumer, and to also include everyone who helped make that cup possible, from the Equator barista to the farmers who grew the beans.
Soyarie
Location: Gatineau, QC
Distance from Campus: 15km
Carleton Dining’s tofu recipes are made possible with the help of Soyarie, based in Gatineau, Quebec, just across the Ottawa River. When Soyarie was founded in a small Hull bakery by Koichi Wanatabe in 1982, there was virtually no tofu business in the region. Soyarie has since grown out of that bakery and is now Quebec’s leading producer of tofu, producing on average six metric tons of tofu per day!
