Can we ferment our way to more food security? | 24CA News
When you consider fermented meals, you most likely conjure up pictures of sauerkraut, wine and cheese.
But this centuries-old meals processing expertise holds the potential to assist lower meals insecurity, and Saskatchewan is poised to be a worldwide chief in it.
“In Canada, we are lucky to have so much food,” says Mehmet Tulbek, the president of the Saskatchewan Food Industry Development Centre in Saskatoon, which works with corporations to create new merchandise, together with utilizing fermentation. “That’s why we need to lead this movement. We can provide a more sustainable and secure food supply chain. That’s really the key about this technology.”
Fermentation expertise at a business scale gives the chance to develop extra nutritious meals merchandise utilizing crops and by-products that exist in abundance in Canada, and even to rework what would in any other case be waste from meals processing, Tulbek says.
WATCH | CBC’s Natascia Lypny checked out a few of the Sask. corporations experimenting with fermentation:
Food fermentation expertise is getting used to supply extra nutritious meals in an environmentally pleasant method. CBC’s Natascia Lypny speaks to folks in Saskatoon, Sask., who’re main the way in which.
Why fermentation?
Fermentation was traditionally used to increase the shelf lifetime of meals. It mainly refers to changing microorganisms into meals, substances or merchandise with particular features.
On a business scale, the fermentation course of works a lot the identical, though it’s extra managed by way of the cultures concerned. Companies have been notably centered on utilizing fermentation to change the dietary content material of meals, and make them extra palatable.
According to the Good Food Institute, the meals processing business started utilizing fermentation broadly within the Eighties. In latest years, curiosity on this expertise is spiking to the purpose the place it is thought of a pillar of the “new protein revolution,” which refers back to the growing international demand for high-quality various and plant-based proteins which are developed in sustainable, moral and environmentally pleasant methods.
Innovative meals processing options, equivalent to fermentation, can be crucial to addressing the world’s rising meals insecurity points, says Steven Webb, the manager director of the Global Institute for Food Security. In its Saskatoon-based bioengineering facility, it develops substances equivalent to proteins that can be utilized in meals and product improvement at processing centres just like the Food Centre.
Webb says, globally, meals insecurity is worse now than it was three years in the past attributable to quite a lot of elements, together with the COVID-19 pandemic, the conflict in Ukraine, and a quickly growing world inhabitants. In November, the world hit eight billion folks, and the United Nations estimates the worldwide inhabitants will hit 9.7 billion by 2050.
“We need to be able to feed the world nutritiously and sustainably with less land, less water and less resources,” says Webb.
Why Saskatchewan?
Home to roughly 43 per cent of Canada’s arable land and a burgeoning value-added sector, Saskatchewan is especially nicely positioned to do this.
“In Saskatchewan we have too many resources,” says Rajneesh Tyagi, a Saskatoon-based entrepreneur and fermentation knowledgeable. “Our challenge is basically to add value to our local crops.”
For instance, a number of native corporations are actually producing protein focus from pulses (crops like peas and lentils), which leaves a starch by-product. Fermentation gives the chance to make use of these by-products by remodeling them into nutritious merchandise, like ready-to-eat, plant-based “meat” that appears, tastes and looks like the true factor, and can be utilized in quite a lot of methods.
Fermentation may also assist create protein concentrates and isolates from the cereals and pulses grown in Saskatchewan which are extra simply digestible for people. So, your physique finally ends up getting extra out of the identical quantity of meals, says Tyagi.
One of Tyagi’s corporations, Proveta Nutrition, has already seen success utilizing fermentation to create cost-effective animal feed that does simply that.
Another Canadian firm, Algarithm, has used fermentation to create a plant-based, environmentally pleasant Omega-3 oil. Now, it is working with the Food Centre to check new methods of utilizing the oil in meals merchandise.
‘The subsequent bio revolution’
In 2020, McKinsey and Company, a administration consulting agency, estimated the bio-manufacturing business may develop to $4 trillion a 12 months globally over the following 10 to twenty years.
“It’s thought of as the next bio revolution or next industrial revolution,” says Webb.
To get there, Canadian companies want extra assist to scale up their manufacturing to get gadgets on cabinets at reasonably priced costs.
“There are so many organizations in Canada working in this space and when we combine all these efforts, still there is not enough capacity,” says Tulbek. “So this is a really growing area. Over the next 30 years we’ll be needing quite a bit of fermentation and the bioengineering research, incubation and commercialization for the startups to grow and then to commercialize that.”
The Saskatchewan Food Industry Development Centre is constructing an eight-thousand-square-foot facility in Saskatoon to assist simply that.
“It’s a place we can pilot and trial different things at a big enough scale that we can see if it’s going to work when we go up to 100,000 litres or not,” says Algarithm president Ben Kelly.
Last 12 months, the Food Centre additionally introduced together with companions that it was placing $1.3 million into increasing its fermentation and coaching program, with a deal with plant-based merchandise.
Another problem can be addressing the regulatory facet of issues, says Webb.
“One of the things that’s been a real challenge for innovation in the ag and food space is the ability to take really interesting technical innovations and make them market impacting,” he says.
Any new meals processing expertise in Canada is topic to strict federal rules, which some business members imagine may be prohibitive to innovation.
Tyagi additionally sees a necessity for funding — financial and in any other case.
“The industry is very new, so participation of all stakeholders is required for the rapid growth and expansion of the sector,” he says.
Despite these challenges, there’s a sturdy sense of optimism inside the sector.
“We need to be more proactive in building resiliency into our systems here at home and internationally to ensure food security,” Webb says. “I believe that innovation is the solution. I believe, because of our performance and proven track record in terms of new tools, new technologies, new innovations, we can address these challenges.”
