Arctic Food Security Needs Indigenous Knowledge

Over the past year, we’ve interviewed founders, mapped food clusters, and reviewed cases across Arctic Canada and Northern Norway. Conversations about innovation often started with technology, yet they kept circling back to something older, particularly in the Canadian Arctic.

Indigenous food practices surfaced not as tradition, but as working systems that communities still rely on.

In the Canadian Arctic regions, many food initiatives are collectively owned and locally governed. Benefits go to communities, not individual entrepreneurs. Revenues are reinvested in local infrastructure. These arrangements are not always called "innovative," yet they reflect an alternative economic logic.

One built around continuity, shared responsibility, and resilience rather than short-term returns.

These systems were built to handle uncertainty. Seasons shift, infrastructure is sparse, ecosystems are unpredictable. Practices like diversification, flexibility, and shared access are not about maximizing output. They are about maintaining balance over time.

With climate change accelerating and supply chains under stress, these principles resonate in new ways.

The Aqqiumavvik project in Canada is an example of what Indigenous-led food innovation looks like. It combines goose harvesting with population monitoring and ecological research. The community governs it, and the community benefits. Food security improves, ecosystems are monitored, and local research capacity is built.

Indigenous food-sharing networks serve a similar function, acting as distribution systems in remote communities where market-based supply chains are unreliable.

In Northern Norway, Sámi food practices follow similar principles. Modern companies talk about "circular economy" and "zero-waste processing" approaches that echo practices traditional communities have relied on for generations. Innovation does not replace tradition here; it extends it, translating old knowledge into organizational and technological new forms.

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In Sámi contexts, food systems also engage with new tools where they align with local priorities, including cold-climate agriculture, fisheries management, and energy solutions.

The Arctic regions face many of the same barriers: getting food in and out is expensive, regulations were not written for these conditions, financing is hard to find, and workers are scarce. Innovation in the Arctic is rarely linear.

It is iterative, adaptive, and often led by small teams deeply rooted in their communities. Social innovation; how communities govern themselves and share resources, matters as much as any new technology.

Indigenous food systems offer insights into how food, culture, economy, and environment are deeply intertwined. Exploring these pathways more carefully can help broaden how we think about innovation itself, especially in regions where resilience matters as much as growth.

This article draws on research from our new Arctic food innovation report, developed as part of the Arctic Business Index at Nord University.