The oversized pizza oven sitting atop what looks like a stainless steel pool table is the Saskatchewan government’s latest gift to food producers.
The $16,000 impingement oven will allow the Saskatchewan Food Industry Development Centre located at the University of Saskatchewan to better develop food products.
It allows the food being tested to be produced more safely, efficiently and in a healthier way with temperature and moisture controls, said Dan Prefontaine, president of the seven-year-old centre.
The oven will definitely help in product development, said Lester Lodoen, a Fox Valley, Sask., farmer who spent the past 21Ú2 years creating New York Sticks, a hand-held meat snack now being tested in the eastern Canadian market.
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“I’ve been working in meat quality for 20 years and you need two things: a way to use up the trim after the prime meat cuts are sold and a healthy form of eating; dashboard dining, I call it.”
Lodoen said his product needed to be marketed as a fast but healthy food so he wanted to ensure it was not deep-fried. The oven at the centre helped him find a way to cook it so it stayed flavourful as well as nutritious.
Prefontaine also noted that consumer trend.
“The whole industry is going to ready-to-eat, so test marketing is built around the cooking process.”
On Prefontaine’s wish list for the centre is a way to increase its capacity through a smokehouse to start cooking sausage products. He also hopes, as does Lodoen, that a larger facility will be built in Saskatchewan in the next five years to produce food products at a commercial level.
He noted that the centre has helped put $7 million of food product into the market since 2000 and that each year he gets 1,500 phone calls that turn into 90-100 new company starts.
Drake, Sask., lamb producer Gord Schroeder said his industry realized in 1998 that it had to make more money. At that time 90 percent of all Saskatchewan lambs were sold live to markets in Eastern Canada. But transport costs and shrinkage on the lambs were cutting into producer profits.
Schroeder said the lamb producers have now developed new products from their livestock.
“Most are precooked. Microwave in four minutes is our goal.”
During the March 5 funding announcement Saskatchewan agriculture minister Mark Wartman was asked if there would be more money coming to increase the province’s value-added work with food.
“You’ll see when the budget comes out,” said the minister, who added, “we don’t want to be just the cow-calf operation of Canada.”
