Professor and Senior Director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab, Dr. Sylvain Charlebois discusses the growing need for food system transformation and the structure that will allow for a rapid shift to take place on this new episode of The Plantbased Business Hour with Elysabeth Alfano.
Specifically, we discussed
- What is your work at Dal University and do you focus solely on food system shift?
- What has your research told you about the rise and fall of the sector?
- What are you seeing now in the marketplace that can indicate a shift?
- How has this changed – if at all – in the last two months?
- What innovations in this area are you seeing in Canada?
Below is a highlight clip and transcription from our long-form conversation.
Elysabeth: I bring on today’s guest, Dr. Sylvain Charlebois from Dal University. I should have started the podcast with “Bonjour, tout le monde,” but in fact, no, I have not.
Let me ask you then, as you are Senior Director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab, and you’re studying what bio-industrials are doing perhaps to the Canadian economy or maybe global trade and you’re also looking at food innovation around the world, maybe we’ll start with Canada. What shifts are you seeing in food systems transformation, specifically both with food innovation or let’s say biotech innovation that’s impacting food? What’s happening in Canada that you’re seeing is really taking hold and taking root?
Dr. Sylvain Charlebois: Well, generally speaking we’re still looking at a very active agenda around different cultivars to increase yields. Of course, it’s all about yields. It’s also about dealing with different climatic conditions and hard conditions. As you know, in different parts of North America there are areas where there’s just no moisture at all. So obviously there’s demand for genetically modified grains or crops that can actually survive very harsh conditions. So there’s been a very clear focus on that overall.
Of course, when you look at lentils and pulses in general, that is a growing segment as well. So as you know, Canada is one of the largest exporters of pulses in the world, thanks to AGT which is led by a great friend of mine, Murad Al-Katib, and he’s originally from Turkey but now he’s a Canadian and he’s built this amazing empire called AGT out of Saskatchewan and exports a lot of lentils, chickpeas, and peas to the rest of the world and it’s been incredible.
That has really brought us, as you know, when you start building this pull effect, farmers follow. So that’s kind of what happened in the prairies in Canada is where you saw AGT really get more farmers to get into pulses and grow more and rely on these crops to actually make money. Of course, here we are looking at a very democratic sort of protein play. That’s what I call it. We’re moving away from meat a little bit and into vegetable protein.
So innovation is very much about crop yields, of course, but it’s mostly about distribution and processing. There are several new crushing plants being built right now to basically do the value add on site in Canada in particular. Frankly, I think that’s going to help the industry overall.
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