Realizing a $25-billlion-a-year opportunity: Q&A with Bill Greuel at Protein Industries Canada

Bill Greuel, the inaugural CEO of Protein Industries Canada, has led the Prairies-based innovation cluster for more than six years. The industry-led, not-for-profit cluster is one of five federally funded global innovation clusters across the country. Protein Industries Canada’s mission is to invest collaboratively to accelerate innovation and the competitiveness of the Canadian plant protein sector. On July 31, Greuel steps down as CEO, to take a position as deputy minister of agriculture with the Saskatchewan government. Greuel talked with Mark Lowey, Research Money’s managing editor, about what the cluster has accomplished, what still needs to be done to realize a $25-billion-a year Canadian industry in ingredient manufacturing, food processing and bioproducts, and whether the innovation cluster model will survive a new federal government.

R$:  Protein Industries Canada has been operating for more than six years now. What are a couple of the innovation cluster’s major accomplishments and, as CEO, what are you most proud of?

BG: If I think about the accomplishments, I was just looking at our statistics ahead of our annual general meeting.

We’ve invested $578 million into Canada’s value-added [agriculture and ingredient manufacturing] sector. We’ve funded and supported 607 organizations. We’ve helped create 455 unique intellectual property assets.

We’ve had 29 of our member companies receive follow-on investment of a total of $320 million. And we’ve funded and supported 72 individual projects.

It’s really about laying the foundation for an industry. Value-added agriculture and ingredient manufacturing is a nascent industry in Canada. We do some flour milling, we do some canola crush, but this whole idea of ingredient manufacturing is new.

I think what we’ve done in the last six years is really laid the foundation for a future industry and helped catapult it forward. We laid the foundation for what can be a globally relevant ingredient manufacturing sector in Canada.

What I’m most proud of is seeing the growth in the sector over the course of that time. It’s the team of people around me at Protein Industries Canada. I have been so fortunate to have amassed the talent that I have in that organization. We’ve got people with backgrounds in process engineering, food science, intellectual property law, nutrition, regulatory management, financial expertise. With this team, it starts with a project but we can help companies really build a business around that. I'm most proud of helping some of our member companies achieve what they’ve achieved.

R$:  What are a couple of the key advantages that Canada has in value-added agriculture and ingredients manufacturing?

BG: We have many advantages: access to raw commodities, environmental sustainability, a strong innovation ecosystem, and market access due to our proximity to the U.S. and through trade agreements.

We produce unique, high-protein crops, specifically canola and pulses, and we can quickly adapt and scale new protein crops. Our sustained advantage comes when we have continued access to the global market with products that come from these crops.

Also, Canadian agriculture has a long history of global success. Whether it’s our track-record for producing some of the world’s highest-quality cereals, our creation and global expansion of the canola industry, or our reputation for adopting and championing the most progressive and strictest production, sustainability and quality-assurance practices, Canada has established itself as a true agricultural powerhouse.

R$:  You have promoted ingredient manufacturing, food processing and bio-products as a $25-billion-a-year industry for Canada. What is the biggest thing that still needs to be done to achieve this goal?

BG: What I’ve learned in my time here is that there’s no silver bullet. We work really hard to identify the elements of what I would call strong industrial policy needed to grow the sector. It comes down to five things:

Continued innovation support for industry. If you look at innovation support across the federal government, I’ve always been a little bit critical – even though Protein Industries Canada is a federally funded institution. This government is so highly focused on the energy transition. I’m not questioning whether that’s good or bad. But we don’t support innovation in agriculture and food processing to the degree that we need to, like we are doing in the aerospace and automotive [sectors] or the energy transition.

Agriculture and food is the largest employer in Canada, second-largest contributor to GDP, yet receives a very small portion of innovation funding and support in the federal government. So we need to continue innovation support.

[Secondly], we need regulatory reform. We’ve established a Centre for Regulatory Research and Innovation to help drive that. Novel food regulation in this country still takes too long. It’s still too onerous relative to competing markets. We need to fix that.

The third thing is market developments. Canada does a great job of promoting itself in international markets, but we do that generally at the commodity level. We need to think about that promotion at the ingredient level.

Fourth, we need to focus on critical infrastructure. As we think about the transition from commodity to ingredient, we have to have an infrastructure and a transportation system that evolves with it, so that we can get these new types of products to markets.

Finally, we need to enable more private capital into the sector. If you want to pin me down on the most important thing, it’s ensuring that we’ve got private capital flowing into the sector. The challenge is, this is a new and growing industry and it’s risky. But there are ways and tools that we can utilize – federal funding institutions – to take on a little bit more risk in value-added agriculture and ingredient manufacturing to enable more private sector capital to flow into the sector.

It’s all interrelated. This is why we wrote “The Road to $25 Billion”, a roadmap to get there, and why we positioned this roadmap as the industrial policy we need to do that. It’s not enough to fund Protein Industries Canada with $350 million to support innovation if we’re not going to think about the rest of these things.

R$:  You’ve advocated for Canada having a strong industrial policy in the agri-food sector. Why is such a policy needed and what would be the benefits – how would this policy change the present landscape?

BG: I think it’s about recognition at all levels of government that agriculture and value-added agriculture/food processing is a growth industry for Canada. When the federal government stands up and says, “Electric vehicle batteries is an industry of the future for Canada,” and they put incentives on the table for investment, guess what happens – industry steps up.

I never hear Industry Minister [François-Philippe] Champagne talking about the importance of agriculture and food. It is not on the radar of policy- and decision-makers in Ottawa, and it needs to be.

I think strong industrial policy is rooted in a recognition at the federal level that agriculture and food is a growth industry for the future of this country. And it ticks all the boxes. It’s green, it’s sustainable, it’s national, it hits on food security, it’s export-oriented, it creates innovation-based jobs.

R$:  What do you see as the potential benefits of artificial intelligence in this space, and what is Protein Industries Canada doing to support and integrate the use of AI?

BG: To me, AI is about de-risking the innovation cycle. By that I mean, by using AI and machine learning we can do faster product cycling times. We’ve got some companies that have done work in digitizing the organoleptic properties of ingredients. So, what is the mouth feel, what is the texture, what is the nutritional profile, how do ingredients act and function in a different recipe. If you can do that in an AI state, you can iterate on products faster.

I think there’s an element of meeting consumer needs better, by better consumer prediction. And the prediction can be in terms of our tastes changing. Do we have different demographics of the consumer base that want different products? And what are the trends that are emerging so that companies can get [to a product] faster and go where the puck is going?

The third area is around cost reduction, and something like that would be digital twinning of ingredient manufacturing facilities so that we can look at area of predictive maintenance and better operations of ingredient manufacturing facilities. That’s all in the food space.

Some of the biggest applications of AI are at the breeding and production stage, and we can’t forget about that as being integral parts of the value chain that lead to highly sustainable and cost-effective ingredients. So [this includes] a lot of work in terms of advanced breeding technologies and using genomic data for predictive analysis around faster cycling of plant breeding. And then also the whole predictive analytics piece around crop production at the farm level, to reduce input, drive efficiency, and lead to more environmentally sustainable crops.

R$:  You were an assistant deputy minister for the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture prior to becoming CEO of Proteins Industries Canada. You’ve now decided to return to the Saskatchewan government, as deputy minister of agriculture. Why did you decide to make this move, and why now?

BG: I’m very passionate about agriculture. I’m a Saskatchewan farm kid. I grew up in central Saskatchewan on a mixed grain and livestock farm. I witnessed first-hand the devastating effect of drought in the late 1980s, the effect of high interest rates in the early ’80s, commodity price collapses. And I just believe so much in this sector.

If I can go back [to government] and in some small way use the experience I’ve had in both the private and the not-for-profit sectors to help farmers and ranchers and agri-businesses in Saskatchewan to be more successful, that just really feels good deep in my soul. This is a bit of a passion project for me, to go back and head up the excellent Department of Agriculture in Saskatchewan.

Saskatchewan is really supportive of this space, and not all delivered through the Department of Agriculture. There’s Trade and Export Development that administers what’s called the Saskatchewan Value-added Agriculture Incentive, which is a tax incentive on future earnings for investments in value-added Agriculture. [Saskatchewan also provides] really strong support for R&D. They pump about $30 million a year into research and innovation to support the front end of the value chain.

Is there more that we could do? Absolutely.

R$:  How do you see the future of Protein Industries Canada and the other four global innovation clusters? Do you think they’ll survive a change of federal government – or at least that the momentum and initiatives started by Protein Industries Canada will survive?

BG:  If I go back to the statistics that we started the conversation with, we’ve proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the cluster model works to support economic growth in Canada. I’ve got success stories and I can give you all the statistics. And I know that my cluster counterparts have just as many success stories as I have.

The base level is that the model and the approach is working. Collaborative innovation is working. Incentivizing or de-risking or accelerating innovation closer to commercial success is leading to the right economic outcomes that we want in Canada, which is jobs and GDP growth and creation of IP assets that we commercialize here.

I can’t get in the head of the elected and the policy decision-makers. But I do know that the [performance] metrics don’t lie. And it’s a really great place to start from as we look forward to the future of Protein Industries Canada.

Future policy- and decision-makers, regardless of the political stripe and who wins the next federal election, need to understand you can’t build an innovation cluster and expect to stand up an industry in 10 years.

What I will say specifically for my cluster is that we’re supporting growth in the Prairie region of Canada, in rural Canada, in an industry that makes tangible things. At the end of the day, I can show an elected official a product that we’ve taken from the crops we’ve grown in Canada and put on a store shelf, both domestically and internationally. I think that’s going to resonate.

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