OCTOBER 2012
CELEBRATING 132 YEARS AS CANADA’S PREMIER HORTICULTURAL PUBLICATION
VOLUME 62 NUMBER 10
VALUE-ADDED PROCESSING
Carrots or cars: choose your economic driver KAREN DAVIDSON How to grow the perfect carrot doesn’t excite Paul Smith. He’s got 900 acres of root vegetables in the Holland Marsh that need to be washed and polished for clients along the U.S. eastern seaboard and grocers in the Greater Toronto Area. His mission? Just-in-time pieces. Unlike car manufacturing, agricultural processing is about disassembly. It’s about growing millions of imperfect parts and taking them apart for multiple end uses. In the case of Smith’s Pier 27 plant near Keswick, Ontario, it’s the key source of two-inch carrot plugs that are shredded by major salad companies in the U.S. What would be a culled carrot for some, is a value-added piece for Pier 27. “In any given crate of carrots, there are imperfect carrots because some are short, some are thin, some are broken,” explains Smith. “But there’s no nutritional deficiency in any of them.” Here’s where a processing line adds value, sizing and matching the entire run to the perfect application. Carrots are presoaked, polished and then hydrocooled to one or two degrees Celsius. Carried along on a conveyor system, the carrots go through a length sizer as well as a diameter sizer. Depending on the size, the graded carrots are shunted to specific crates of like-sizes where they are packaged to meet
INSIDE Growing Forward 2 disappoints
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How to be a regional supplier
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Focus: Stewardship
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www.thegrower.org P.M. 40012319
Pier 27, a value-added carrot facility at Keswick, Ontario, is a hive of activity at this time of year. Co-partner Paul Smith opened the doors to show the efficiencies of the processing line. In high season, he sends 60 trailers of finished product to the U.S. and domestic destinations every week. It’s just one of dozens of plants in southern Ontario that contribute to the third largest food cluster in North America. Photo by Glenn Lowson. client specifications. Fifty-pound jumbo bags go to institutions while three-, five- and 10-pound cello packs are sorted for grocery chains. An overview of the facility floor reveals what a labourintensive process it is. And like the auto companies, Smith is seeking a competitive edge with technology. Thanks to an Italianmade optical colour sorter and reconfigured line, processing is more efficient this fall requiring less manual labour. By installing another hydro-cooler, Smith has cut one step of handling the carrots and saved energy costs too. “Our optical sorter is the shining star,” explains Smith, who says that 80 per cent of the greenish tips are graded out by this process rather than by hand labour. It’s these kinds of upgrades that are keeping Pier 27 competitive on a North American basis. It’s not easy due to a number of issues, not the least of which is
the current above-par value of the Canadian dollar. About 65 per cent of what’s grown in the Holland Marsh is exported, so currency values are followed daily. Access to skilled labour is another issue that restricts agricultural processing. “It’s a challenge to keep qualified people,” says Smith, who cites the example of an offshore
worker who was adept at managing the onion line. “When he couldn’t get back into Canada, it cost us nothing but money.” Smith’s concerns about competitiveness are timely as the Alliance of Ontario Food Processors just released a report mid-September that highlighted the food and beverage industry as a key economic driver. The report shows almost 127,000 processing
jobs in agriculture compared to motor vehicle manufacturing at 31,500 jobs. “We need to switch our thinking that the Ontario economy runs on four wheels, and remind everyone that the food and beverage industry drives it,” says Steve Peters, executive director, Alliance of Ontario Food Processors. This sector generates $38 billion in revenues with $1.3 billion in tax revenue for the federal government, $858 million for provincial treasuries and $78 million for municipal coffers. “The food and beverage manufacturing sector is the farmer’s number one customer,” Peters points out. “The sector buys 65 per cent of its ingredients here in Ontario.” “In the past, we’ve looked at the value chain from the farmer up but we now need to look at consumers first and their needs, then communicate back,” says Peters. CONTINUED ON PAGE 3