Waterloo startups helping bridge local food processors’ technology gap
Technology was pretty basic back in 1957 when Willy Huber and his two brothers opened the doors to their Waterloo, Ont.-based butcher shop and deli. Equipment consisted of a refrigerator, a freezer and a sausage-making machine that would crank out around 50 to 60 pounds of sausage a week.
That machine now stands as a showroom relic at Waterloo, Ontario-based Piller’s Fine Foods Inc. In its place are room-sized devices and computer-monitored equipment that churn out thousands of pounds of sausage and meat products hourly, as well as about 25 tons of ham a day.
The shift from three brothers cranking out sausages to a multimillion-dollar high-tech food production company speaks to how far technology has changed in the past half century, not only for Piller’s but for the Canadian food processing industry.
The world around us is changing; the borders are opening up and we as an industry need to compete
Yet it’s nowhere close to where it could or should be, those in the industry readily admit. Which is why Huber has thrown his weight behind a City of Waterloo-funded program called Canada’s Technology for Food (CTFF) – a first-of-its-kind initiative to divert local college and university brainpower that might otherwise go to developing the next hot video game or mobile app to food processing production.
“The world around us is changing; the borders are opening up and we as an industry need to compete,” says Mr. Huber. “The best way to do that is with technology, and we have the knowledge and expertise right here to tap into it.”
Technology on Canada’s production lines still has a long way to go. While a few of Canada’s larger food processing companies have embraced automation, robotics, vision-guided systems and other technology to improve productivity and boost profit margins, the vast majority are still running their factories with a combination of manual labor and unsophisticated equipment.
Ted McKechnie, former president of Maple Leaf Foods and now head of the CTFF, has no shortage of examples of where the gaps along the production line are.
“Take stuffed chicken: you have automation before and after, but you’ll still see 10 people in between stuffing it with ham or cheese by hand,” he says. “There is some combination of robotics and vision systems out there that can automate that, making it faster, more efficient and safer, but you don’t see it here.”
That’s where CTFF comes in. Using the City of Waterloo’s Accelerator Centre, a high-tech mecca funded by the city and region of Waterloo, its universities and colleges and the federal and provincial governments, the CTFF will work with food processors to pinpoint issues like hand-stuffing chickens or manually shaving fat from ribs and create high-tech, never-before-seen solutions.
The Waterloo region is no stranger to reinvention. In the 1980s it saw the rise of auto assembly. In the 1990s, hardware and portable technologies started to take off. In the 2000s it was software and apps.
“Now we’re starting to see general interest in things that have more mechanical and firmware components to them,” says Tim Ellis, head of the Accelerator Centre, which will house the next great (and commercially viable) made-in-Waterloo food production technology.
To be sure, there is foreign technology already at play across the Canadian food chain – from meat and poultry, to milk and beer, to packaged vegetables and ready-to-eat entrees. The problem is the technology has to be imported because the knowledge base doesn’t yet exist in Canada, notes Mr. Huber.
It’s not just about competition, it’s about putting Canada on the map where we should be
“That’s the whole focus of this initiative – to create technology in the food industry that helps Canadian producers compete, but also to create new technology that we can export,” says Mr. McKechnie.
It’s also to get ahead of the curve and create new technologies that help produce safer food through homegrown technology that can be exported to other parts of the world where quality and safety standards aren’t as advanced, says the city’s mayor, Brenda Halloran, who championed the CTFF.
The potential is huge. There are more than 1,400 farms and 100 food processors and distributors in the Waterloo region alone that stand to benefit from the program.
The initiative’s partners intend to share the wealth by providing to-be-discovered technology and expertise to the rest of Canada’s 8,000-plus food producers to help them be more efficient and competitive.
“It’s not just about competition, it’s about putting Canada on the map where we should be,” says Mr. Huber. “But to do that we need people that are educated and focused on innovation in the industry. That’s where we need to be.”