It’s All in the Bones: Upcycling Bones into Nutritious Broth

June 6, 2019

[This blog post is from a Podcast Interview we had with Jill Weaver, founder of Stock Exchange. You can listen to the full interview here.]

Jill Weaver

When Jill Weaver first started making bone broth out of her kitchen she never imagined it would then turn into her business: Stock Exchange. As a new mother her child seemed to have food sensitivities to almost everything. Worried, Jill began looking into ways of reducing these food sensitivities and ensuring her child still continued to get enough nutrition through the few foods her kid could eat. From book to book she began deeply investigating back to nature and whole food principles when she then stumbled upon a cookbook called Sally Fallon’s, Nourishing Traditions, Cookbook. The first recipe she started to make: a classic bone broth.

After making that initial recipe Weaver was hooked on bone broth. She cleverly began using it in most of her cooking to fortify her kid’s food with more nutrition. Including boiling pasta and rice in, you guessed it, bone broth! A smart way to ensure picky eaters get the nutrition they need. While the overall bone broth benefits are touted non stop (from stronger nails, shinier hair, improved joint pain, good source of collagen), Weaver focuses on the basics that Bone Broth can be a foundational base to your cooking that adds a ton of nutritional value to every meal.

About Stock Exchange

Weaver’s company, Stock Exchange, has now brought her back to her roots. She was raised in a family of farmers. Her father from a dairy farm, her mother from a sheep farm – Weaver grew up in a family that together built one of the largest livestock exporters in Canada. With this past experience with farmers, she builds strong relationships with farms. Before she works with any farm to turn their left over bones into broth, she assesses the farm for their practices. Questions like “how do you raise your animals?”, “what do you feed your animals”, and “what do you do with a sick or injured animal. These questions help give her a clear picture of the culture of the farm, and to evaluate if the farm will be the right fit for her company. Stock Exchange wants to work with farms that have the most sustainable raising standards for their animals. The better their standards, the higher nutritional content there will be in their bones, and in turn the greater nutrition there will be in the Stock Exchange’s Bone Broth.

Traceable, Local, Upcycled

What is most impressive about Stock Exchange’s production is its emphasis on traceability, locality, and upcycling. First, Weaver ensures that each Bone Broth is fully traceable back to one farm. So while Bone Broth may be the basis for soup, it’s not a mystery soup of bones from anywhere and everywhere. Each Stock purchased comes from bones that are from one specific farm. Second, Stock Exchange is committed to operating locally. If she were to grow the business to outside of Ontario, Weaver would open a new facility that only gathers bones from animals from farms local to it, and sell it back to consumers in that same community. She’s not interested in having bones shipped across the country to her, then bone broth shipped back out across the country. Weaver believes that local sourcing, production, and consumption is important. Local is a core component of her business’ values.

Finally, Stock Exchange is an advocate for using the whole animal. Utilizing under utilized animal parts. Making sure parts of the animal are upcycled before being discarded. Already through the businesses, the farms have the opportunity of having their bones used for bone broth (Otherwise options are limited. Farms either sell to a tiny market of consumers who want bones, or they have the bones sent to an incinerator). Then through boiling the bones, a natural byproduct of fat collects at the top of broth. Rather than dispose of this fat, Weaver invests the time and energy of collecting this far, storing it and repurposing to sell to restaurants for their deep fryers or hot plates, or even other possibilities of getting it turned into soap or cosmetics.

The company’s values in traceability, locality, and sustainability is exactly why NIKU Farms is working with Stock Exchange to convert our partner farms bones into nutritiously dense bone broth. You can get bone broth in many of our packages, and the bones of that broth? They are fully traceable back to the very same farm you’ve ordered your package from.

You can now add bone broth to any of our subscription packages! Click here to check out all of our ordering options.