The $100 million investment to develop a Bowden, Alta., yellow pea wet fractionation plant, which broke ground last fall, is seeing spin-off investments with another nearly $30 million being announced for the region’s burgeoning industry last month.
A consortium that includes Protein Industries Canada, More Than Protein Ingredients Ltd., Quantum Mechanical Technology Inc. and Hamman Ag Research Inc. announced the funding, which will help support innovation in the protein field from seed genetics to ingredient processing.
Protein Industries Canada will be putting up nearly $6 million of the total funding, with its chief executive officer, Bill Greuel, stating the future looks bright.
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“What we’re seeing (is) a lot of optimism in the sector right now and the investments that we’ve made at Protein Industries Canada are leading to new and novel technologies that companies are on the cusp of commercializing and growing on scale,” he said.
The need to develop processing capacity is only growing stronger, he added, highlighting supply chain issues, commodity prices and recent geo-political events.
“I think there has been more of a sense of urgency in recent times,” said Greuel regarding increasing domestic protein processing capacity.
But even without those issues, demand for food globally continues to rise as the world population expands, he added.
“We still have people wanting to consume more plant-based products, be that for whatever reason they choose. Maybe it’s health, maybe it’s environment, maybe it’s animal welfare,” Greuel said. “You’ve got the fundamentals underpinning the growth of the sector in combination with reduced production in Western Canada, supply chain disruptions happening in North America and global grain stocks — we don’t know what the challenges will be from the war in Ukraine.”
All of that taken into combination is spurring plans for further development in the sector.
“We’ve got a number of projects that we’ll be announcing in the next couple of months, additional projects around ingredient processing,” said Greuel. “We will have some project announcements coming in April that will look at the use of western Canadian produced ingredients being utilized by food brands in Canada.”
