It’s all hands on deck at Rad Relish Co. in West Kelowna.
Through a partnership with the Greater Vancouver Food Bank (GVFB), the local business recently found themselves in possession of more zucchini than most would know what to do with.
The GVFB offered them 54,000 lbs of zucchini and the chance to save the excessive amount of fresh vegetables from ending up in a landfill.
“We said sure, let’s do it,” said Garrett Millsap, who co-founded the zucchini relish company alongside Red Seal chef Kyla King in 2021.
According to Millsap, the food bank ended up with more zucchini than it could handle thanks to the relatively-new BC Farmers Tax Credit.
It incentivizes farmers to donate unused food to receive a tax credit rather than composting it or throwing it away, but there’s only so much a food bank can do with thousands of pounds of fresh vegetables.
So the GVFB reached out to Millsap and King for assistance and the result was a semi trailer packed to the brim with 26 pallets of zucchinis arriving at Rad Relish a few days ago.
The duo’s first task was figuring out the logistics behind refrigerating such a significant amount of food. Once they did that, they jumped into action to process it all before it spoiled.
They spent $10,000 on a second grater to handle the load and recruited a team of 10-12 people to help out. Millsap says the group of helpers includes stay-at-home moms, retirees and others who were open to picking up a bit of temporary work.
"It's honestly just amazing when you put a call out to community to come and help that people just show up,” Millsap told KelownaNow. “In the Okanagan, people will support small businesses and entrepreneurship and that's why this valley is just such a special place."
They’re not just casually lending a hand either, as Millsap says the group is working 12-hour days to cut, wash, weigh and grate the tens of thousands of pounds of zucchini.
They had finished around 30,000 lbs as of Tuesday morning and are hoping to get through the entire load by the end of Wednesday.
“It’s a race against time,” Millsap noted. “It’s fresh produce, it does have a shelf life.”
To put it all in perspective, the Rad Relish team usually processes around a pallet a day during their relatively short summer season to produce their stock for the year.
In 2024, they processed just over 30,000 lbs of zucchinis in two months. They’re now tasked with doing nearly double that in less than a week.
The result will be roughly 175,000 packages of their zucchini relish, Millsap explains, and a lot of it will be donated back to the GVFB and other food banks around the region.
They’ll also be able to restock the shelves of around 600 grocery stores across the country that carry Rad Relish, but that isn’t as ideal as it sounds.
You can only restock shelves that have been emptied, which is why they’ve put out a call to the public to support the business’ efforts by picking up some Rad Relish at the grocery store.
It’s a win-win, as customers can pick up a great product while helping Millsap and King as they try to give back by curbing out food waste.
“That's one of the big goals of mine and Kyla's is to reduce food waste and create food security in this country,” said Millsap. “There's still food waste going on in Canada. There's still perfectly good food getting thrown away and getting composted rather than going into people's bellies.
It’s been quite the journey for Rad Relish since the company’s humble beginnings in 2021, built on a long-time recipe of Millsap’s 96-year-old grandma Peggy.
The Millsaps are Métis and Garrett was never able to find similar Indigenous-made products in stores, which spawned the idea of a business around the beloved family recipe.
After teaming up with King, they first made 1,000 jars of the product and it sold out almost immediately at the Kelowna Farmers’ and Crafters’ Market.
According to Millsap, King was getting calls from people outside of BC that winter asking how they could buy more of the zucchini relish.
“We kind of knew right then and there that we had something,” Millsap said with a laugh.
Rad Relish can still be found at farmers’ markets, but it’s now also available in hundreds of grocery stores and even online through Amazon Prime.
Last year, Rad Relish was named ‘Business of the Year one to two person enterprise’ at the BC Achievement Foundation’s Indigenous Business Awards.
Millsap, who has a goal of inspiring other young and Indigenous entrepreneurs, called it “incredible and so humbling” to be honoured with the award.
"One kid said to me, 'why relish?' And I said, 'if you can do relish, you can do anything,'” explained Millsap. “If you can make a zucchini relish company work, you can probably make anything work."
As for grandma Peggy, Millsap says he hasn’t been able to really share this recent news with her because he’s been far too busy grating zucchini.
“I will probably give her an update and she'll probably again think I'm crazy and nuts, but she's pretty proud of (the business),” he noted. “It's just so awesome that she is still alive and well and able to see it."
You can learn more about Rad Relish through the company’s website and stay up to date on their ongoing zucchini processing efforts through their Instagram and Facebook pages as well.
