Canada has to become better at adding value to food products. The food business is undergoing tremendous change as consumer tastes change and Canada needs to take advantage of that trend, says Don Buckingham, President and CEO of the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute.“Consumer preferences and retail food markets are changing extremely fast and food companies are simply not able to respond to them as quickly as they would like,” he told the Senate agriculture committee.The top 10 food companies have suffered significant sales declines as consumers move away from national brands, he said. The clear message is that people are searching for different foods. The question is whether Canada can cash in on that trend.“We have to figure out where the new value is,” he said. “The obvious thing is in new products, but that is not the only thing. What we feel is that there is a possibility of monetizing Canada's comparative advantage in producing high quality, safe and environmentally sustainable foods for gaining trade advantages.”Research by companies such as Campbell and Kellogg shows that in addition to safe foods, consumers “want transparency, sustainability and ethnic options to purchase,” he said.“Even more so, they want those healthy ingredients and environmentally sustainable, socially conscious-sourced food products. These are the ones where small enterprises will be able to have an advantage in providing the quality attributes.”The finding applies in North America and elsewhere, he said. A Nielsen survey found Chinese grocery shoppers want safe and healthy food. “Those are attributes that we in Canada, as a trusted global leader in providing safe and nutritious food, can supply into the future.”The challenge is how Canada's processors will respond. “Small operations with fewer than 100 employees account for 94 per cent of the food and beverage processing in Canada. Medium processors, those with between 100 and 500 employees, are about 5.4 per cent, which leaves half a per cent for the large enterprises of 500-plus employees.“Large enterprises produce a lot of the product, but there are a lot of players in this sector,” he said. While small and medium enterprises are generally game to try “and do new things, invent new products and find new markets,” they often lack the financial resources.To help smaller companies, Canada needs “a new delivery model for partnerships of growth,” he said. “Our objective is to have a sustainable food system with new products that consumers demand that we will be able to sell, and that will require our industry, in co-operation with governments and policy communities like our own and science research communities, to develop new ways to understand and monetize the quality of sustainable aspects of the growth agenda.”Canada has “a traceability system that can identify a soybean produced in southern Ontario in a particular field so that it is non-GMO soybean, and it will be paid a very hefty premium in Taipei or Tokyo by the soy milk producers,” he said. “That's the kind of quality we could accentuate in many other products. What we are doing now for identity preservation for that quality aspect, we could move into environmental sustainability.”Green vegetables grown in California are produced with irrigation and depletion of the aquifer which is becoming significant, he said. “In Canada, we have rain-fed agriculture, which is the most sustainable method of producing food. We don't get any value for that. The tomato produced in one place or another place, the consumer does not know how it was produced.”An upcoming CAPI report will spell out ways for the Canadian agrifood sector to concentrate on ways to supply traditional products as well as develop new ones, he said. It will have to promote the idea that Canada needs to monetize the value that can come from sustainability. “Right now a Brazilian soybean and a Canadian soybean are indistinguishable on the world market and, in fact, there are some very significant differences with respect to environmental sustainability.”The report “will suggest that new partnership models for innovation and co-operation have to be actualized,” he said. “They are starting to be formed and some of that is at the initiative of the federal government with the superclusters program and with the national Food Policy, where we are bringing together companies, organizations and associations with government that don't usually fit in the same room. That is a very welcome development.”The super cluster program including Protein Industries Canada has become an opportunity for industry to ask what governments, producer associations and corporate players can bring to the table, he said. As well, “we need to have one voice coming out of the agriculture science policy and value-added food and beverage industry.”Alex Binkley is a freelance journalist and writes for domestic and international publications about agriculture, food and transportation issues. He's also the author of two science fiction novels with more in the works.