There’s light at the end of the long tunnel that Burcon NutraScience has been crawling through in the hope of getting canola and other oilseed protein products into the commercial marketplace.
The Winnipeg company’s products are being tested by “some very major food companies,” says its president.
“It’s 16 years now, and it’ll be 18ish before it gets to market,” said Vancouver-based
Johann Tergesen, whose company has a number of patents on oilseed protein extraction technologies.
Burcon will not say which companies are now running the canola protein isolates through their laboratories, but the company, which is part-owned by Archer Daniels Midland, expects to hear back from them within a couple of months.
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Protein isolates are used in many baking products, in protein bars and shakes, in veggie burgers, battered fried foods, mayonnaise, glazes and gels. The isolates Burcon plans to commercialize, called Puratein and Supertein, will compete with protein products from the egg, dairy and soy industries.
Tergesen is excited major food companies are looking at the company’s products, but he is also cautious. Allowing giant companies to look too closely at Burcon’s sophisticated creations without extracting some guarantees would have been reckless.
“Because we’ve been developing up these products and have patented the process by which we make them … we were not comfortable providing them to companies just yet until they would sign agreements that indicated what would happen to ownership of any intellectual property that might arise,” said Tergesen.
But with those agreements signed and Burcon’s innovations protected, the company wants to see what the big food companies can do.
“When the food scientists at huge companies like Coca Cola and Nestle look at it, it is our expectation that they will come up with things that we haven’t even heard of,” said Tergesen.
“In the huge length of time we’ve been working on this, we’ve not really had a chance to provide our products to the major end users.”
The pathway started in 1990, with a canola research company in Winnipeg called B.M.W. Canola that worked on isolating oilseed proteins. Tergesen and his colleagues bought that company in 1999, and he admits he never expected product commercialization to take so long.
“The trends in the food industry develop slowly and then survive for long periods of time.”
For example, many products advertise that they are low fat or low salt.
“These are things that have been around for 25 years,” said Tergesen.
The company has obtained specific patents on its flax protein extraction process because it had to be substantially tweaked to fit the nature of flax protein compared to the canola extraction process. Tergesen said the company has high hopes because flax is such a hot health food product now.
