I imagine some farmers, commodity guys, mega-processor types used to scoff at all the blather about “healthy foods” that has been all-the-rage at food, grain industry and human health conferences for the past 20 years.
But I think that particular scoffery has probably shrunk to a whisper in recent years, as the reality of a booming new market has made itself known,
“Our growing is going to be healthy food,” Alexandra Asmar Lopez of Colombia’s biggest food company recently told me about her food processing company’s outlook on new markets.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
“Now everyone wants to be healthier.”
Her company doesn’t just supply tiny enclaves of obsessive my-body-is-a-temple urbanites, but sells mass market food products through Latin America, exports to Africa and is trying to expand its small sales to the U.S. market.
That “healthy” tag is becoming a major marketing hook for many products, and everyone seems to be trying to make their products “healthy.” Heck, even the Kraft Dinner I feed my kids (too much) comes in whole wheat versions with instructions on how to lower the saturated fat. (My kids prefer the full-flavour, full-butter, white pasta version I grew up with, despite my efforts to force-feed them the better stuff.)
I remember when healthy food seemed pretty flaky. In the early 1970s, when I was a wee lad, there wasn’t too much interest in health food, and the term itself – “health food” – connoted something of a worn-out hippie feeling. Or a hippie-gone-semi-straight feeling. There was a health food shop in my neighborhood in Regina where we occasionally shopped, and there weren’t too many other places in the city to get that kind of food. Now the stuff is everywhere. You can’t go to a strip mall without finding a  health food shop there, it seems. But health food now is mostly found in the giant grocery stores, because so much of the food there now deliberately contains “healthy” ingredients.
The investment by governments, farmers’ organizations and companies in healthy food development has been huge. Here in Winnipeg there’s the Richardson Centre at the University of Manitoba testing products and seeing their affect on human consumers. Flax and hemp companies are producing and marketing foods across the world, aimed squarely at the healthy food market.
And at the Canadian International Grains Institute there have been years of development of pasta and bread products containing ingredients like pulse flours. That kind of product is of keen interest to people like Lopez, who I spoke with there at CIGI, because that’s the sort of product they’re selling into the healthy food market.
“We try to include some peas, some different grains,” said Lopez.
“The common grain is wheat and oats. Now we want to introduce peas, different flavours, try to be healthier and have new products.”
For people in the food industry, this is no news at all, because they’ve been active in this market for many years. And for farmers heavily involved in commodity organizations like pulse growers’ groups, this is well-known. But for me, as an outsider, it’s always nice to speak to actual end users of Canadian grains and discover whether what we talk about so much translates into truth at the end of the supply chain.
It seems with healthy food, it’s not just a major trend in North America and Europe, but anywhere consumers have choices over the foods they eat.
