Technology | Spring 2008
Canola crosses new frontiers.
By Kieran Brett
Genetic progress is picking up speed. The first herbicide-tolerant canola made weed control easier for growers. Now, high-oleic lines are gaining ground in the food industry.
Market opportunities for canola are expanding. The new high-oleic canola gives Canadian growers a fighting chance to gain traction in the competitive food service and food processing sectors.
In terms of the needs of restaurants and food processors, high-oleic canola oil might be as big an improvement on regular canola oil as canola was on rapeseed.
In frying applications: no contest
It's Monday morning in an American restaurant. Before service can begin, the cook needs a fryer full of hot oil. That's where Willie Loh comes in.
"If you look at a restaurant, whether it's part of a 10,000-unit chain or a mom-and-pop operation, certain things are important to the manager," says Loh, director of sales and marketing for Cargill Specialty Canola Oils' business unit in Minneapolis, MN.
A key requirement for a frying oil is the ability to enhance taste. In Loh's experience, restaurants are looking for a hard-to-define capacity to reflect the natural flavour — but at an elevated level — of the food being fried.
"High-oleic canola oil has the ability to create a wonderful fried food flavour," says Loh. "Not all oils can deliver that."
Just as important is the oil's life expectancy at frying temperatures. If standard canola oil goes into a fryer about 10 a.m., heating up for a lunchtime service, it will start to break down by dinnertime. When conventional canola oil breaks down, foods emerge from the fryer limp and soggy. Flavours get mixed up, too: potato fried after fish comes out tasting like fish.
For these reasons, conventional canola oil needs to be changed at least once per day. That might sound easy, but to a food service operator short on staff and time, it's not. First, you drain the oil out of the fryer and dispose of it. Next, you clean the fryer. Finally, you refill it with fresh oil and heat the oil to frying temperature.
High-oleic canola oil, by contrast, can last for at least a week. "That is a huge difference in relative performance," says Loh. "You'll be adding oil as you go, but you won't have to replace all of the oil for seven to nine days. The reduction in labour and downtime is very significant."
Taste, health, shelf life drive growth in food processing
As large as the food service industry is, the food processing sector is just as big. Even though the demands it places on cooking oil are different, its needs also favour high-oleic canola. Whether the product is croutons, granola bars or baked goods, high-oleic canola is staking its claim.
"In this market, we want oil to taste like absolutely nothing," says Loh. "You don't want to taste the oil at all." While corn oil and conventional canola oil each impart their own flavour, high-oleic canola does not: score one for the new guy. Longevity is another consideration. Just as restaurants want frying oil that keeps going and going, food processors value an oil's ability to stay fresh and not go rancid.
"A granola bar needs to have a nine- to 12-month shelf life," says Loh. "If we made them with standard canola oil, they would have a four- to six-week shelf life. A granola bar could sit in your glove compartment for six months, but when you finally open it, it had better not be stale."
Trans fats meet some food industry requirements for stability and long life, but have been a target of health authorities for several years now. Food companies are responding by eliminating trans fats from their manufacturing processes. High-oleic canola is a natural replacement.
In Loh's analysis, the next big food/health battleground will be over saturated fats in processed foods, especially those most consumed by children. Here again, Western Canada's signature oilseed stands poised to gain as saturated fat levels are reduced.
"What we are doing at Cargill is taking high-oleic canola into other foods, creating shortenings that are low in saturated fat and contain zero trans fat," he says. "Canola has a natural advantage because we start out at a lower level of saturated fat to begin with."
Premium package geared for growers
If restaurants and food companies are to have the high-oleic canola oil they want, someone needs to grow the canola. To ensure a consistent supply, Cargill and Bayer CropScience have entered into a partnership built around the new InVigor Health line of high-oleic canola hybrids.
In recent years, some canola growers have been reluctant to participate in specialty oil opportunities. While mindful of available premiums, they doubted that the higher price was sufficient to offset what they suspected might be lower yields.
According to Lionel Lamont, marketing manager for InVigor, the days of the yield penalty are over.
"InVigor Health really gives you the best of both worlds," says Lamont. "You earn a premium price for your canola crop, but you also get the high yields that growers have long associated with InVigor hybrids."
He believes that InVigor Health's roughly $1 per bushel premium represents a reasonable reward for a modest amount of additional management.
"Whatever you normally do to grow a good canola crop applies here," Lamont says. "Other than keeping crop segregated in the bin, there are no agronomic limitations on how you manage your InVigor Health canola."
With prices for commodity canola north of $10 per bushel, it's not the easiest time to ask growers to consider a specialty oil contract. Some will take the view that with commodity canola already a profitable proposition, there's little incentive to chase an extra dollar per bushel.
Gary Galbraith, Cargill Spcialty Canola Oils' Canadian production manager, knows it will take more than a price premium to attract production volume in today's market. "Growers are looking for a total program," he says, "not only a seed variety, but an attractive price and convenient delivery."
Apart from the buck-a-bushel premium, Galbraith notes that InVigor Health contracts have several unique features. When growers sign up, they can choose from eight different delivery periods and be compensated for the length of time they store the crop. In terms of risk management, basis levels are locked in when growers sign contracts. This way, they're not vulnerable to basis fluctuations over the life of the contract.
With dramatic performance advantages over conventional canola oil, high-oleic canola oil seems ready to penetrate new markets. Oil suppliers like Cargill will be looking for a consistent supply and top quality. By developing a high-oleic InVigor line, Bayer has brought high yields to the specialty oil market.
The rest, of course, is up to growers.
Says Galbraith: "We've had continuous demand for the end-use oil and so we're continuing to contract InVigor Health. Growers find this opportunity very attractive compared to commodity canola."
