“Canadian farmers produce the best quality food in the world.”
We make that statement so often that it’s almost a cliché. But is it true?
Take this test: if you had a 50 kilogram bag of top quality cleaned flax seed, how much junk – weed seeds, kernels with cracked hulls, bits of stem – would you expect to find? A cup? Half a cup? A thimble full?
The thought of even a thimble full is enough to make Cecil Werner shudder.
“Definitely, you wouldn’t find a thimble full,” says Werner, president and chief executive officer of CanMar Grain Products Ltd., a Saskatchewan company that sells roasted flax seed.
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“We can’t guarantee 100 percent purity, but we guarantee 99.9999,” he said. “We try to get 100 percent because I don’t want to have a container load cancelled on me because someone found one bit of flax stem that was the same size and colour as a roasted flax seed.”
Let’s get this straight. Werner is saying that if you examined one million little flax seeds coming off his processing line, you would find, at most, just one mustard seed or just one flaxseed with a cracked hull.
Actually, one in one million wouldn’t cut it.
“When we were first doing test trials, our customers in Japan were complaining when they found one part in three million – you know, some tiny piece of stem or something,” Werner says.
It’s hard to imagine how that kind of purity is even possible, although, not surprisingly, the answer is partly cutting-edge technology and mostly lots of extra effort.
The dozen growers who produce for CanMar take extra measures to ensure their fields are as weed free as possible while staying within recommended levels for government-approved chemicals. They follow a strict soil testing and fertilization plan to ensure a vigorous crop with the maximum number of plump, healthy seed pods.
They clean their combines and grain trucks to within an inch of their lives before heading out to harvest and they truck straight to a seed cleaning facility and then to CanMar’s own super-clean silos. Before roasting, the seed is cleaned again and examined by an electronic colour-sorting scanner. After roasting, a second set of electronic eyes gives everything another look-over. It rarely finds anything, but that is the goal, after all.
There’s nothing wrong with traditional quality standards for food-grade flax, Werner says; they’re just not good enough for his customers, who pay a hefty premium for his products.
“Our customers in Asia are teaching us that they want perfect product and we have to strive to achieve that.”
And it’s not just the Japanese who are fixated on raising the bar for quality. Werner says major multinationals such as Nestle are also upping their quality demands.
To some, this may seem like fussiness, not to mention a royal pain in the butt.
But CanMar investors, who put up $4.5 million for their Regina plant, obviously see something else: opportunity. The company expects annual sales to hit the $5 million mark by mid-2007 and then double again by 2009.
It’s not an easy way to make money. High quality means high costs, including fancy equipment, extra cleaning, expensive testing for mould and other microbiological organisms and premiums for growers.
A large inventory is another costly expense: CanMar has to keep lots of raw seed on hand in case this year’s crop doesn’t make the grade, which is what happened in 2004 when an early frost and subsequent warm spell pushed up mould levels.
For Werner, that’s just the price of being in the quality game. About the only thing that seems to make him nervous is saying too much publicly for fear a competitor might learn something to its advantage. But of course, he acknowledges, any competitor that isn’t already obsessed with quality isn’t in the game.
He says the same attitude can’t be found in the general farm community.
“I don’t think it’s really sinking in yet,” he says. “You can look at a bag of flax and think, ‘this looks pretty darn good.’ But when you start dissecting it seed by seed, then you can find there’s lots of stuff in there. And if you examine it on a microbiological level, you realize there’s a huge range of quality.”
That’s the key point. Even if you have the best quality product, you can bet that somewhere, someone is examining it from all angles Ð under a microscope if need be Ð and asking, “how can I go one better than this?”
And when they get to that next level, it’s also a pretty good bet they’ll find buyers waiting with open wallets.
Glenn Cheater is editor of Canadian Farm Manager, the newsletter of the
Canadian Farm Business Management Council. The newsletter as well as archived columns from this series can be found in the news desk section at www.farmcentre.com. The views stated here are for information only and are not necessarily those of The Western Producer.
