What Mark Magdule really wanted was a yummy, fishy snack to take home with him, but the Mexican left Manitoba disappointed.
He found lots of fish, honey, flax and the other components of what could be a great made-in-Manitoba snack food, but none of it was put together in a scrumptious package he could sell through Mexico’s network of Wal Mart and Sam’s Club stores, for which he is a supplier.
“What I would have loved to be able to do is take a piece of fish from here with a honey glaze on it,” Magdule said in an interview during the annual Fields on Wheels conference in Winnipeg.
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Magdule sells his company’s bagel-based food through Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer. He has found a growing population of middle class Mexicans hungry for the food of western nations.
There is now a population of about 20 million consumers with the money and desire to eat more than Mexican staple food.
Canadian ingredients such as flaxseed are a big hit in the nation. However, the real money is in value-added food.
Mexico has seen a rapid transformation in the past 30 years as it has industrialized and modernized.
Barry Prentice, director of the University of Manitoba’s Transport Institute, said when he first visited the country three decades ago, a region on one side of the nation could be overflowing with pineapples while the other side of the country experienced a pineapple shortage.
There was no national transportation system and all markets were local.
Now, while the national economy is still backward compared to Canada’s in many ways, and while transportation is still a big challenge, Mexico is developing a First World type economy and market and is ready for the kind of goods that Canadian food producers can supply, Magdule said.
Flax success
The desire for higher value food is shown by the success of flax products in Mexico. Magdule said Bimbo, the nation’s dominant bread company, started including flax in whole wheat bread and manufacturing flax-containing granola bars.
The company advertised the products in the same way they are promoted here: “It’s healthy for you. It’s high in omegas,” Magdule said.
“People love it.”
This year his success story is a new multi-grain bread he is selling through Sam’s Club. It contains flax and is decorated with sunflower seeds.
“The product is selling real well,” he said.
There’s room for a lot more flax in the products Mexicans eat, he added.
Recently, he was speaking to the manufacturer of a chicken tenders snack food.
“I said: ‘where’s your flaxseed?’ It would give it that much more value-added.”
Organic food is also becoming popular in Mexico, but the wave is just beginning, so Canadians with experience should be able to leap in.
“Organics is very new in Mexico, but it is nothing new to Canadians,” he said.
With all the potential for sales to the Mexican market, Magdule was surprised that Manitoba offered so little for him to consider. He was especially saddened by the lack of fishy snacks.
“I would have thought that there was somebody processing the fish or that there was an added value to the fish that I could take back to Mexico,” he said.
“A lot of the producers that we’ve met with in the last couple of days are more commodity oriented and not so much value-added oriented.”
