Building sustainable, practical solutions

When Robin Richards looks at a shipping container, he sees possibilities. It could be a freezer, backyard cabin or small storefront.

“The opportunities are endless,” Richards said.

The 40-year-old entrepreneur is the co-founder of NIBI Environmental Technologies Ltd., a Winnipeg business that recycles shipping containers and turns them into custom modular pods. The turnkey pods are designed to be mobile and durable.

Richards started the company in 2022 with business partner Kelsey Friesen. Last year, the company set up its headquarters in an industrial park in the Transcona neighbourhood of Winnipeg and began manufacturing pods.

Richards and Friesen started kicking around the idea for the business during the COVID-19 pandemic. Food insecurity was on the rise at the time, and the longtime friends wondered if they could offer sustainable, practical solutions to underserved communities across Canada.

“We’ve always just been spitballing ideas on how to make the world a better place and this is where we landed,” Richards said.

Richards, who is Métis, used the Ojibwa word for water to name the company.

Among NIBI’s offerings is a water purification pod aimed at customers in remote and Indigenous communities. The pod includes a pump house where residents can bring bottles to sanitize and fill.

The system can produce up to 28,000 litres of potable water per day per pod, according to NIBI’s website, and can draw feed water from a range of sources, such as bores, streams and saltwater.

The company also offers the NIBI Agro Pod, an adaptable agriculture system that allows the owner to grow fresh food.

While walking through NIBI’s shop at 770 Pandora Ave. E last week, Richards pointed out one container the company had turned into a commercial kitchen for a community in the Northwest Territories, and another bound for Quebec that had been turned into a smoke shop, complete with front counter, shelves and digital signage.

The company recently sent seven agro pods to Mississippi and 22 to Maryland in the United States.

“We’re able to deploy these anywhere in the world,” Richards said. “There’s nothing better to ship than a shipping container, so it really works out in our favour.”

Richards and Friesen bring a variety of experiences to their work at NIBI. Richards was a professional hockey player before transitioning to a career in sales.

Friesen, meanwhile, co-founded Winnipeg nutraceutical company Innotech Nutrition. He then moved on to local cannabis producer Delta 9 Bio-Tech Inc., where he helped develop the company’s business-to-business division.

NIBI employs five people and uses subcontractors to fabricate the pods. Richards declined to say how much the pods retail for, but said NIBI’s prices are competitive with companies like Growcer, the Ottawa-based modular farming startup that has a manufacturing operation in Manitoba.

“We’re able to put ourselves in the price point that we need to be to be competitive as well as (to) be accommodating to these (Indigenous and remote) communities,” Richards said.

Making a difference in the community is important to Richards and Friesen. To that end, NIBI has partnered with Food Banks Canada to transport $25,000 worth of food to Sambaa K’e First Nation in the N.W.T.

The food will be transported to the First Nation in three modular pods the community ordered.

NIBI’s interest in helping Indigenous and remote communities make them a good partner for Food Banks Canada, said Jason Stevens, a manager at the charity.

“We just felt we wanted to be part of this project where food is being shipped into a First Nation in the North, and we wanted to bring attention to food insecurity issues that our communities face in the north,” Stevens said.

To help get NIBI off the ground, Richards received a non-repayable grant from the Louis Riel Capital Corp., an institution of the Manitoba Métis Federation that helps Red River Métis citizens start, expand or acquire businesses.

NIBI is one of 926 Métis-owned businesses registered with the Red River Métis Business Directory, said MMF senior economic adviser Lorne Pelletier.

In 2024-25, the LRCC funded nearly $6 million in commercial loans which supported 57 businesses, Pelletier said. The corporation also approved more than $3 million in grant funds to 63 Red River Métis-owned businesses.

“Red River Métis are entrepreneurial people … and Robin at NIBI is introducing a really innovative product to the market,” Pelletier said.

The LRCC wants Métis entrepreneurs to succeed so they can support themselves but also the larger community through job creation and by providing quality products and services, Pelletier added.

aaron.epp@freepress.mb.ca