New initiative wants agri-tech firms to reach commercial production ASAP

A new $7 million business accelerator aims to help nine Canadian companies grow their operations and strengthen food security. Funded by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the HARVEST accelerator program will invest $750,000 and provide mentorship to clean-tech and agriculture start-ups with a goal of taking production methods to commercial scale as soon as possible. The [...]

Article content A new $7 million business accelerator aims to help nine Canadian companies grow their operations and strengthen food security. Funded by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the HARVEST accelerator program will invest $750,000 and provide mentorship to clean-tech and agriculture start-ups with a goal of taking production methods to commercial scale as soon as possible. The program is managed by Ontario Genomics, a nonprofit funded by the government of Ontario and other partners.

Spokesperson Maggie Blood said the nonprofit invests in researchers and start-ups to drive industrial biotech through homegrown, cutting-edge solutions in food and agriculture, medicine and cleantech. “With over 600 partnerships and $3.5 billion in investments, we’ve been working with governments, various industries and innovators for over 25 years to get ideas out of the lab and into the real world,” she said. “HARVEST is our latest accelerator to help do that.”

Mike Dorrington, Ontario Genomics’ head of food and industrial technology, said Canada has all the ingredients for biotechnology to make a big impact. “We have amazing access to feedstocks. We have amazing researchers here.

We have a relatively clean energy grid, access to clean water and all these components,” said Dorrington. “So, we’re really trying to put them together so Canada can become a leader in that, become self-sufficient, have greater food security and also more opportunities for exporting goods to other countries to bolster our economy.” New Brunswick’s Chinova Bioworks Inc. is among the businesses participating in the accelerator.

He said the pair launched the company to find a way to transform the chitosan derived from discarded mushroom stumps into a natural alternative to artificial preservatives. Since then, the company has received $1.5 million in funding from Sustainable Development Technology Canada, a federal government fund for green tech firms, to expand into a new production facility in Prince Edward Island. The company uses a patented green-chemistry process to create its products from the mushroom stumps.

Dorrington said Chinova Bioworks was the “perfect project” for the program. “The technology itself has those economic and environmental benefits, but also the feedstock they are using and the output that they are producing also have those kinds of knock-on effects,” he said. Chinova has global distribution partnerships with McKinnon saying the firm recently entered the East Asian Pacific market and looks to further expand into the South American market.

He said this HARVEST funding will help the company meet that potential. “With both of these global markets (the funding) should hopefully help us meet the increased volume that is going to be required for the demand that these markets potentially have,” he said. “This will really support our ongoing efforts to optimize and scale the eco-friendly upcycling process that converts these underutilized Canadian mushroom stumps and biomass into a high-value food ingredient, and it’s going to help us accelerate the commercialization of our innovative biobased products while improving our process efficiency, increasing yields and reducing manufacturing waste.”

Other companies taking part in the program, which is funded by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada include: - ABAzyne Bioscience (Saskatoon, Sask.) which is modernizing cold-weather crop protection with a bio-spray for grapes and other fruit. - ALT TEX (Toronto) which is transforming food waste into biodegradable fabrics for the fashion industry. - B.Nature Biotech (Saskatoon, Sask.) which is upcycling food waste and local rock phosphate into a made-in-Canada biofertilizer.

- Launch Bioindustries (Toronto) which is scaling production of sustainably made microbes that turn dairy byproducts into an ingredient for biodegradable plastics. - Lucent Biosciences (Coquitlam, B.C.) which is developing an eco-friendly, controlled-release nitrogen fertilizer, helping crops absorb nutrients better. - Performance Plants (Kingston, Ont.) which is developing canola that is drought and heat resistant and captures more carbon from the atmosphere.

- SymBL Innovations (Toronto) which is engineering microbes to upcycle dairy by-products into ingredients used in food, supplements and healthcare treatments. - Vive Crop Protection (Mississauga, Ont.) which is creating a precision pesticide that targets the genes of specific pests doing damage to crops but is harmless to all other species. “What we really wanted to see is the potential impact both economically and environmentally and how we can help these companies really expand,” Dorrington said.