Last year they hauled out the last piece of original machinery from the Canadian International Grains Institute.
That leaves baking expert Tony Tweed as the only item from the organization’s 1972 birth still left in place.
“An oven’s pretty much an oven,” said Tweed, explaining the piece of machinery’s longevity.
His personal longevity, and the longevity and vitality of CIGI, are due to constant technical upgrading and increasing sophistication that have kept CIGI relevant to the Canadian grain industry and to buyers of Canadian grains around the world.
Read Also
European wheat production makes big recovery
EU crop prospects are vastly improved, which could mean fewer canola and durum imports from Canada.
Rather than becoming irrelevant as the milling and baking industries — and the farming and plant breeding industries that support them — have changed, CIGI’s move up the technical ladder has taken it to levels never conceived of 40 years ago.
As Tweed was being interviewed in his office in CIGI’s downtown Winnipeg headquarters, a roomful of Saudi millers were on another floor being taught the finer points of using specific Canadian grains, grades and classes, another room full of Pulse Canada members were discussing food applications of pulse crops, Asian noodle formulations were being tried out in the noodle laboratory, pulse flours were being tested in the pulse lab, and bread for British baker Warburton’s was being judged.
One team of CIGI staff was in Colombia working with buyers of Canadian grains, while some CIGI experts were in Malaysia solving a noodle manufacturing problem.
So, overall, it was a pretty average day at CIGI.
Tweed said the world CIGI was born into is radically different from today.
Back in the early 1970s, few Canadians had advanced technical skills (hence his poaching by Canada from the U.K., where he had spent years becoming a certified baker), so there was big demand for a centre that could push skills out to millers, bakers, plant breeders and farmers.
And overseas buyers were often isolated, beset by technical problems and unable to resolve their challenges.
“If you were a baker in Kenya and you had a problem, what would you do,” said Tweed, recalling a world in which international phone calls often weren’t possible, local sources of information didn’t exist, there were no fax machines and the internet was decades away.
CIGI’s courses were a hit from the start, and immediately both foreigners and Canadians began trooping to Winnipeg for instruction.
“We had people from all the world’s grain buyers here in the first couple of years,” said Tweed. “People from those same buying countries still come to Winnipeg, but with different needs and time commitments.”
Back in the early 1970s, when international air travel was a luxury and educational opportunities like CIGI’s exceedingly rare, people would come for six-week courses.
Now, with travel quick and easy, and a world of technical information available on every computer connected to the internet, buyers come with much more refined needs and interests.
The CIGI building in the Portage and Main area looks like a regular office building, but inside it’s a bustling beehive of industrial and commercial activity.
The agency hopes to move before its abilities become restricted by physical size and scope. It is stretching the limits of its custom-built building with processes it never expected to be undertaking in 1972.
But with all the revolutionary changes in the world’s milling, baking, farming and plant breeding industries, it doesn’t see its role changing any, even if its approach is continually modified.
People around the world no longer need basic instruction, but have demanding technical requirements.
“CIGI is widening its role, expanding its services very significantly,” said Tweed, pondering his upcoming retirement and the end of his reign as CIGI’s last remaining piece of original equipment.
