Juice blends are the leading money makers in today’s beverage industry, and research into exotic prairie berries could help carve local producers a piece of the pie.
Buffaloberries, chokecherries and sea buckthorn are among the test subjects in a University of Saskatchewan research project looking into the chemical composition of native Saskatchewan berries.
Nick Low, a food science professor heading up the project, said he wants to find out if the province’s home-grown fruit has economic importance beyond homemade jams, jellies and pies.
“Every company we’ve spoken to is interested,” Low said, “and now they’re just waiting for the research to come through.”
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The three-year, $50,000 Saskatchewan Agriculture grant will be used to examine the chemistry of local berries that could be used by national and international juice companies to create new juice blends.
Low hopes the berries turn out to be high in vitamins and solids with a unique, mouth-watering taste.
Unique products
“The way of the future is novel blends and companies are always trying to come up with new products to use as secondary ingredients,” Low said.
Saskatchewan has to change its reputation as a “raw material” province by holding onto control of its own resources, he said.
“We have to get away from the style of ‘you produce our product and we’ll buy it back for 100 percent of what we sold it for’,” he said. “That means being intelligent about putting money in our own system so we supply the juice without letting go of control and growers here get to keep the profit.”
The team will also look at how juice byproducts, like seeds and skin, could be used for medicinal purposes, in essential oils or as colorants.
“If you find something and can say ‘If you drink this it will improve your health’, you’ll have companies jumping all over you to get hold of it.”
Low is confident the results of the study will be good news for provincial fruit and berry growers.
“I’m positive we’ll come up with something that will make a good juice,” Low said, comparing native Saskatchewan berries to the cranberry before Ocean Spray developed it into a tasty juice blend also valued for medicinal purposes.
“Ocean Spray is now a $1.5-billion company,” he said. “Who knows, maybe a Saskatchewan fruit is headed down the same path.”
Low’s earlier work at the university centred around authenticity testing of foods, or finding out if the list of ingredients on the label is what is actually in the food.
His findings in 1989 gained international attention when he received death threats after discovering a European company was selling 100 percent orange juice which included 20 percent beet sugar.
“They didn’t want me to testify, so a middle man advised me to be careful.”
The company also threatened legal action, Low said, but was eventually fined for producing a fraudulent product.
