SASKATOON – The makers of a new colostrum replacement called Head Start say it is “not a very high tech product” and is really just powdered milk.
It has not been available before and the company expects it to make a profit.
Yet no one has previously tried to bring in a 100 percent replacement for colostrum.
That’s because seemingly simple new products must often follow tortuous paths to the store shelves.
“It’s real easy to just do research and stop. The hard part is actually doing it. I think if we hadn’t actually done it ourselves it wouldn’t have been possible for someone else to do it,” said Deborah Haines, one of two researchers involved in the product’s development.
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Haines and Brian Chelack at the University of Saskatchewan’s veterinary college in Saskatoon developed the product after being approached in 1989 by cattle producers wondering which colostrum supplements contained enough antibodies for newborn calves.
Chelack and Haines discovered most supplements were woefully inadequate and the best could only supply about half of what a cow’s colostrum provides.
Fill in the gap
Because of the obvious gap in the marketplace, the researchers applied to the Saskatchewan Agricultural Development Fund for money to develop one.
Using university labs, Chelack and Haines found colostrum could be spray-dried without losing its antibiotic properties.
They published their results, but no company wanted to spend the time or money to develop it commercially.
The expected profit margin on the product isn’t high enough to tempt large companies and smaller ones were daunted by the expense of building facilities and overwhelmed by regulations.
The project could have died there, but Chelack said the university and Alberta feed distributor Brad Brown pushed him and Haines to do something with the research.
“This is an excellent example of funding agencies, governments, universities, entrepreneurs and farmers all co-operating to form a new business venture,” said Don Hrytzak, the president of Nuvatech, the organization that provided technical help in developing Head Start.
While creating powdered milk might not sound like rocket science, Chelack said the art lies in turning colostrum into a shelf-stable substance that is still potent.
“The difficulty is in drying it without cooking it so it no longer works. You want it to maintain its properties. It can be done, but it’s tricky,” he said.
Chelack added it took time to establish a regular supply of colostrum, since many Saskatoon-area dairy producers seemed suspicious of a person trying to buy excess colostrum and driving away with it in the trunk of a car.
But once farmers learned Chelack was legitimate, the colostrum supply has steadily increased.
The next hurdle was fulfilling the regulatory requirements of the federal agriculture department. Haines said it was more stringent than she imagined, but their academic backgrounds prepared them to collect and package complex data.
The final link in the chain for connecting the product to the market came from Brown. He can get the product into a large number of stores.
Thirty-two outlets in Alberta will soon carry Head Start and eventually all 400 of the stores he supplies in Western Canada could carry it, Brown said.
