Small-scale food processing in Ontario needs regional supports says report

Monday, October 18, 2010

by SUSAN MANN

Ontario’s food processing sector is inadequate for many small and medium-scale farmers and should be restructured into regional food clusters, says the authors of a recently published research report.

Maureen Carter-Whitney, research director of the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy, says through the course of their research interviewing farmers and others they learned tax and food safety regulations are geared more for large processing facilities.  The Institute is an independent, non-profit environmental think tank.

Other jurisdictions, such as Maryland in the United States, are looking to modify their regulations so they still protect food safety but they apply more to smaller and medium enterprises.

For distribution, “we advocate for a regional food cluster to make distribution easier,” she says.

Carter-Whitney describes a regional food cluster as a grouping of facilities and businesses in specific regions “where certain kinds of food is grown.” There would be technologies available in those areas so smaller processors can access them.

In doing the report, called Nurturing Food and Vegetable Processing in Ontario, Carter-Whitney says they got the sense there’s a lot of new, smaller-scale processing happening in Ontario. The markets are there and are growing “but the regulations and the structures in place are really scaled to much larger businesses.”

Sally Miller of the West End Food Co-op says one of the things they learned through the more than 40 interviews they did is there’s a very strong and unanimous need among farmers for local food processing directed at small and medium scale operations. The Co-op is owned by farmers, consumers, social service agencies and workers. It runs a farmers market in Toronto and hopes to open a community-owned grocery store.

John Kelly, vice president of Erie Innovation and Commercialization, agrees that currently in Ontario growers have few routes to market and the system needs to be overhauled. The avenues to market available to growers now are: the Toronto Food Terminal for fresh produce; major retailers; contracting; plus direct sales, such as farmers’ markets or farm gate sales.
 
About 2,000 producers annually sell produce through the Terminal either by having a stand there or going through a major distributor.

“When you look at it from an overall distribution perspective we have a lot of product going into few locations,” Kelly says, noting there’s an opportunity to study ways to improve the distribution system for farmers.

A committee of growers and processors just started a research project to develop more effective distribution models. The committee expects to have some insights “of what we think the future could be” in six to eight months, Kelly says.

Growers are interested in pursuing different distribution models, he says, adding that studying and evaluating other systems is necessary. But evaluation is critical. “You don’t want to do something just for the sake of doing something.”

Co-operatives can be part of the solution to the sector’s problems, Carter-Whitney and Miller say in the report.

Kelly says one challenge small growers face when trying to sell products to major retailers is they can’t produce enough to meet the demand. The retailers are looking for consistent, high quality product. Small growers may have high quality but lack the volume required to get contracts with the big supermarket chains.

One solution would be to establish co-ops where growers can pool their products and then you have that volume required by the chains, Kelly says.

The report was published by the Toronto-based Metcalf Foundation as part of its Metcalf Food Solutions series. The Foundation is a charitable organization that focuses on three areas: the environment, performing arts and developing lasting solutions to poverty.

Carter-Whitney says they hope the report will lead to discussions about the concerns they’ve identified between farmers, processors and governments. BF