Good morning, and thank you for inviting us.
I'm Sean McPhee with the Vegetable Oil Industry of Canada. With me is Doug Sparks, who is chair of our board and is vice-president of Bunge Canada, which is the largest supplier of fats and oils to the food industry. In Mr. Sparks you have a senior executive who is an expert in this area, so I'm going to keep my comments pretty brief, and I hope we can get into discussion.
First of all, to give you a sense of who we are, we represent the vegetable oil value chain. If you think of a vertical column, first we have seed developers; at the next level we have 52,000 canola growers, mainly in western Canada; then we have the processors who refine and produce oil from oilseed; and we have consumer product-makers, who make things like margarine, cooking oil, mayonnaise, dessert toppings, etc. That that's who you have before you.
We just heard that alternatives are not penetrating the market. We're going to give you a slightly different point of view. Overall, our industry has developed formulations to allow bakeries, margarine companies, the food service sector, and virtually all food companies to provide products with no trans fats and, in most cases, lower saturated fat. To give you some details, today virtually every national fast-food outlet is using a trans-fat-free frying oil. Trans-fat-free, low-unsaturated-fat margarines now have the largest market share in Canada. Virtually all the large bakeries in Canada are using trans-fat-free formulations. Many of the facilities within our industry that produce hydrogenated oil, which is the source of trans fat, have either been closed or converted.
The acreage dedicated to producing high-stability oil that does not create trans fat has substantially increased. High-oleic canola now comprises 900,000 tonnes of Canada's canola production, and is expected to increase to 3.75 million tonnes, or 25% of production, by 2015. We estimate that more than 80% of the market is now meeting the task force trans fat limits of 2% for liquid oils and 5% for all other foods.
We will make a couple of comments on the fourth data set for you, the last set of monitoring data, which Health Canada released in December 2009.
The government is considering possible regulation. We're not going to present a point of view either strongly for or against regulation, but what we are in favour of is good public policy, so we have a couple of comments that I hope will guide the thinking and the debate as we go through this. When we look at the monitoring data, it's important to note that it does reflect some sources of trans fat that are beyond the reach of the domestic vegetable oil industry. The data include trans fat levels found in imported mixed foods, such as frozen appetizers and dinners, which are prepared mostly in the United States and shipped as finished products to Canada.
I'm going to ask Mr. Sparks to comment a bit more on that.