Jordan Solomon awarded "Champion of the Year" by Canadian Biomass Magazine
Jordan Solomon awarded "Champion of the Year" by Canadian Biomass Magazine
TORONTO, June 4, 2026, Ecostrat Inc. and the BDO Zone Initiative are proud to announce that Jordan Solomon, President and CEO of Ecostrat and Chairman of the BDO Zone Initiative, has been named “Champion of the Year” for 2026 by Canadian Biomass Magazine, recognition of nearly three decades spent solving the bioeconomy’s most stubborn barrier to growth: feedstock risk.
The honour lands two years after Ecostrat itself was named Canadian Biomass Magazine’s “Company of the Year.” Now the spotlight turns to the company’s founder, cited for building the market infrastructure that makes biomass opportunity legible to capital, and bankable for lenders. What ties that infrastructure together is Solomon himself: he has personally led the development of every standard, rating, and risk product Ecostrat brings to market.
Over a career at the intersection of biomass supply, project development, finance, and market creation, Solomon led the international effort to develop the Standards for Biomass Supply Chain Risk (BSCR), formalized as Canadian National Standard CSA W209:21 in 2021, and now being developed into a binational standard through a partnership between ASTM International and CSA Group. The BSCR Standards give capital markets a common language to evaluate and compare feedstock risk for bio-based projects. That work, advanced with Natural Resources Canada, the Standards Council of Canada, and the Canadian Standards Association, laid the foundation for the standards-based tools Ecostrat is known for today.
Chief among them is the BDO Zone Initiative, which Solomon pioneered to give developers and investors investment-grade intelligence on where new bio-based manufacturing is most likely to succeed. Since the first BDO Zone “A” Rating was issued for Melville, Saskatchewan in November 2020, the platform has grown to 61 BDO Zones across North America as of December 2025. More than $10 billion in announced project value is now linked to BDO Zones, and a recent University of Tennessee analysis of six advancing projects found an average annual economic impact of $423 million per project. The Initiative also helped drive the creation of the CSA TS-005:25 BDO Zone Assessment Technical Specification in 2025. The impact is already visible on the ground. In Canada, an $845-million biofuels facility announced for Vegreville, Alberta, supported in part through Natural Resources Canada’s Clean Fuels Fund, used its BDO Zone rating to help position the region for a project aligned with the country’s sustainable aviation fuel ambitions.
His most recent initiative, Feedstock Supply Insurance (FSI), tackles project-level risk head-on. Developed in partnership with New Energy Risk and launched in late 2025, FSI enables project developers to purchase a hedge or cap on feedstock cost to strengthen lender confidence and unlock debt financing, a new tool now advancing across the biofuels, renewable chemical, biogas, and bioproduct sectors.
“Our mission is simple: make biomass opportunity bankable by giving developers, investors, and communities the standards, the data, and the financial tools to turn feedstock into investment. That work belongs to a team determined to 10x the rate of bioeconomy development in Canada and around the world, and we’re just getting started,” said Jordan Solomon, President and CEO of Ecostrat and Chairman of the BDO Zone Initiative.
To read the Canadian Biomass Magazine feature on Jordan Solomon, click here.
About Ecostrat
Ecostrat is the North American leader in biomass supply chain advisory and due diligence services for biofuels, renewable chemicals, biogas, and bio-product project development and finance. Founded on the belief that reliable feedstock data is the foundation of successful bio-project investment, Ecostrat works with developers, lenders, and investors to quantify and manage feedstock risk across the project lifecycle. Ecostrat is the originating organization behind the BSCR framework and a founding partner of the BDO Zone Initiative. For more information, visit www.ecostrat.com.
About The BDO Zone Initiative
The Biofuel Development Opportunity (BDO) Zone Initiative certifies ‘regional readiness’ for bio-manufacturing, creates global connections and ignites an influx of new energy opportunities for farmers, economic developers, and rural businesses. A BDO Zone rating is an internationally recognized, standards-based technical risk assessment of a region’s feedstock, supply chain, and infrastructure risk with respect to the development potential for new biofuel plants. BDO Zone ratings are precise targets for bio-project siting. Investment grade ratings are force-multipliers for attracting new manufacturing plants to the areas where they are most likely to succeed, drive investment and create jobs.
For more information on the BDO Zone Initiative, contact info@bdozone.org. To view all BDO Zone ratings, visit www.bdozone.org. Check out the BDO Zone LinkedIn page for news and updates.
Jordan Solomon is Chairman of the BDO Zone Initiative and President of Ecostrat (www.ecostrat.com). He can be reached at jordan.solomon@ecostrat.com.
Originally published at bdozone.org.