When Assaad Abdelnour began selling canned beans, lentils and peas, it was a low margin, shrinking business that was, as he puts it, “going down the drain.”
Two decades later, CLIC International Inc. is Canada’s largest food processor of its kind, with annual sales topping $30 million and more than 150 employees.
Some drain.
Abdelnour succeeded because he knew something that existing canning companies didn’t – why people buy canned pulses and how they use them. There’s a message in his story for farmers, although not in the way you might think.
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When Abdelnour emigrated from Lebanon to Montreal in 1978, he found familiar pulses available in the convenient canned format. He was pleased, until he tried them.
“When you opened a can of chickpeas, red kidney or white kidney beans, they all tasted the same,” he said. “The beans were mushy and they all tasted like chemicals.”
The processors were more concerned about process than quality. They soaked every type of bean, lentil or pea overnight (the proper time ranges from a few hours to a few days), added preservatives to make them firm, and then heaped in salt to mask the chemical taste.
As a consumer, Abdelnour was less than satisfied. But as a young entrepreneur trying to get his real estate business off the ground, he was busy with other things. A few years later, after acquiring a supermarket, he decided that canning pulses properly so their natural flavour shone through could be a good sideline.
Business boomed and CLIC, headquartered in Laval, Que., now sells about three dozen types of beans, eight kinds of peas and six varieties of lentils, most available in canned versions.
Abdelnour figures he’s just scratched the surface.
“There is so much we could do in North America. Look at the health movement – we haven’t really done anything to really capitalize on that. What has the industry, from farmers to processors, done to promote pulses to consumers? What has been done to explain to consumers how pulses are a great source of protein with no cholesterol, and about how they can be prepared and used?”
Abdelnour said pulse growers’ organizations put too much focus on exporting raw pulses to Third World countries and aren’t willing to partner with businesses like his to develop markets on the home front.
“You need to sell into bulk commodity markets like India and Bangladesh because that gives you a base for your business, but you also need to develop premium markets because that’s where there is money to be made.
“And if you want to earn a premium price, then you have to develop markets in Europe, North America and Japan.”
OK, so what’s a farmer supposed to do about that?
This is the twist in the know-your-customer story: For Abdelnour, people who buy and eat pulses are key customers. For farmers, guys like Abdelnour should be key customers.
Yet to this day, despite the size of his company, many of his suppliers, or wannabe suppliers, haven’t made any effort to understand him and his business.
“You have to understand the customer,” he said. “Then you’ll understand why when I’m offered a five percent discount for chickpeas with colour variation, I’m not interested. You can offer me 50 percent off and I still won’t buy it because I won’t sell a can that has multi-coloured chickpeas in it.”
CLIC, which buys 15,000 to 20,000 tonnes of pulses a year, is past the stage where it could deal with individual farmers. But it wasn’t always so. In its first year of operation, sales were only $200,000.
How many budding Abdelnours are out there right now? These are people who have spotted an unserved market and need suppliers who can meet their exacting needs.
Maybe the next great idea is flageolet beans (“the caviar of beans”) or grass-fed beef, or traditional foods produced in nontraditional ways.
The next time you see something different in a store, market or on a menu that has an ingredient that you could produce, why not make inquiries about who makes it, who it is sold to, and if they’re looking for premium suppliers?
Maybe the inquiry will be a waste of time, worth no more than a hill of beans.
But a hill of beans can be worth a lot when someone like Abdelnour is behind it.
Glenn Cheater is editor of Canadian Farm Manager, the newsletter of the
Canadian Farm Business Management Council. The newsletter as well as archived columns can be found in the news desk
section at www.farmcentre.com.