Collaboration drives innovation

From CAPI Update, Autumn 2011

How can Canada's agri-food sector provide consumers with healthier meals and at the same time generate new market opportunities? The answer lies in findings new ways to use and promote traditional food ingredients, and bring the right people together to make that possible.

Barley is a case in point. Often used in soups, it has rarely been used as a more versatile food ingredient in North America. That may be changing. Recently, Winnipeg's Canadian International Grains Institute (Cigi) completed a project to develop products from hulless barley. The Institute worked with a range of partners to explore barley's potential, including the Alberta-based Food Processing Development Centre and more than 20 companies in Canada, the U.S., and U.K. The partners included millers and food ingredient suppliers, as well as manufacturers of baked products, breakfast cereals, doughnuts, pizza crusts, and meat products.

For this project, researchers successfully incorporated whole-grain barley flour into numerous bakery items, nutrition bars, snacks, and meat products. This experimentation generated technical information on a variety of food applications that could encourage food processors to consider barley flours in their ingredient mix. Along the way, they could increase the fibre content of many popular page 1 Update continued on page 2 Autumn 2011 products, especially soluble fibre.

"Achieving a broader acceptance for using barley flour in everyday food products has widespread positive implications — for plant breeders looking for feedback from industry on desired traits, for producers seeking to grow crops in demand for their value-added opportunities, and for food processors interested in new, nutritious product options," said Dr. Linda Malcolmson, Manager of Special Crops, Oilseeds and Pulses at Cigi. (Further details about Cigi's Canadian barley project can be found at canadianfoodbarley.ca.)

In support of such advances, the industry must secure a health claim in Canada specifically for barley, similar to one that exists in the U.S. Barley industry members believe this measure helps promote that crop's full potential as a food ingredient with consumers and processors alike.

"Taking a technically viable idea and turning it into a commercially relevant success requires a great deal of collaboration between producers, researchers, investors, business, and government," said Earl Geddes, Cigi's Executive Director. "Having a shared objective — expanding the use of barley as a nutritious ingredient — and attracting champions across the food system is vital to creating new opportunities."

Cigi is also looking at incorporating pulse flours into food products, such as pastas made with yellow peas and chickpeas, bagels containing pea fibre, muffins using various pulse flours, and gluten-free extruded snacks made from 100 percent pea, bean, and lentil flours.

A four-year pulse-flour milling project is currently underway to identify foods that processors could commercialize using pulse flours and create prototypes to demonstrate food product applications.

The project, which will continue to 2014, is a partnership between Cigi and Pulse Canada, and is funded by the Government of Canada, Saskatchewan Pulse Growers, Alberta Pulse Growers, and the Canadian Special Crops Association.

"We're seeing an industry that is increasingly interested in understanding the functional traits of pulse flours as a basis to create innovative and more nutritious foods," said Dr. Malcolmson.