Winnipeg’s Prairie Orchard Farms will soon be the first company in the United States that can legally claim its meat products contain omega 3 fatty acids.
The company, which sells pork from pigs fed a flax diet by dedicated farmers, has received approval from the United States Department of Agriculture to make the omega 3 claim on its labels.
“That’s a great thing for us,” said Prairie Orchard Farms president Willy Hoffmann.
The omega 3 pork has been available in Canada for a year now, and has been sold for almost as long in Japan.
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Prairie Orchard meat was the first in Canada to apply for and receive permission to make the nutritional claim. It managed to work through the process in eight months because it had already been established for meat products by Canadian regulators. But the USDA approval took more than a year because there was no system in place to approve omega 3 claims for meat.
“They didn’t categorize meat as qualified to have omega 3 labelling,” said Hoffmann.
Helpful USDA officials developed a system and now the meat, which is already slaughtered in the U.S. but only advertised as omega 3 in Canada and Japan, can be sold in the U.S. market.
Hoffmann said he’s working to finalize deals with distributors in California and New York, markets that dwarf the western Canadian market.
“It could be substantially greater than what we’re doing here,” said Hoffmann.
In the past 12 months Prairie Orchard has made $3 to $3.5 million in gross sales.
Since Hoffmann’s pork was approved in Canada, U.S. researchers have announced that they have genetically modified pigs that produce their own omega 3 fatty acids. Hoffmann said he plans to use the terms “natural” and “naturally” in his food labelling to differentiate his diet-based program from the GM pigs.
“One of the things we want to make clear … was to identify that these were not those cloned pigs,” said Hoffmann. “This is done all through diet.”
Prairie Orchard Farms buys hogs from dedicated hog farms near Elie, Man., that follow the company’s stringent dietary guidelines. The hogs are shipped to Sioux City, Iowa, for slaughter.
More than two dozen hog producers are on a waiting list to produce pigs for the Prairie Orchard program.
While the meat is often sold under the Prairie Orchard Farms brand name in Canada, U.S. sales will be made under the Verdancia Farms label. That’s because a trademark brand search found too many farms were already using the Prairie Orchard name or similar names to make it an acceptable commercial brand.
