My wife comes home from grocery shopping and complains about how much money she spends on food. I keep reminding her that we have the cheapest food around—but that doesn't usually get me too many brownie points.
When you walk into a grocery store today and ask people what they think of the quality and the safeness of the food in that grocery store, they think it's at the same level and standards of anything we produce in this country.
I'll talk about peppers, because we produce peppers. The food safety protocol that we're producing peppers at right now in our greenhouse operation is second to none. In the last three years, the level has gone up almost like this on the protocol we must follow, because of the marketing company we deal with and the food chains that push it onto them.
By the same token, if you go into the grocery store during the off season, even now, you can see Mexican peppers there. I'm not going to say that all Mexican peppers are produced at the same level, but I do know that there are a lot of things they can do in Mexico that they can't do here in Canada. Now who's checking that out?
Someone mentioned MRLs—I think it was Steve—the maximum residue levels and whatnot. When a person goes to the pepper area and picks up a pepper, whether it says Mexican, Canadian, or Israeli, for example, he or she is just going to assume they're all of the same standard. I know the standard I'm producing at, and I can stand by that 100%. The Mexican guy isn't there to tell you what's going on there, and no one is asking what's taking place.