Certainly it's a competitive market, but it's a growing one. So there's continually more room opening up. If you're looking at some of the private-label brands, which are held by the retailers, those are approximately 21% to 22% of Canadian organic sales now. So the retailers are definitely the front line. They see the information first before anybody else does, and they're certainly responding by introducing new organic products in the marketplace faster than anyone else is.
There's a great amount of growth at the retail level from what we can see. We see, certainly, other examples in the U.S. This is the case with the Whole Foods chain that's also moved into Canada. Also the Safeway chain has developed a brand of organic called the “O” brand, which they've recently taken outside of their own chain. They've started selling it as a brand itself to other retailers. That, again, is speaking to the potential and the growth in the marketplace.
We're seeing some of the challenges along the links to get there. Organic is certainly still a very small player relative to the food sector in general. It's approximately 2% to 4% of food sales in Canada. So what we see is that we may have hubs that are very successful in going right from producer through to the retailer, but there are other areas where there might be gaps.
The typical ones we've heard about in the past are in the livestock sector. There could be great challenges in finding, for example, a slaughterhouse that has the right certifications in place.
Similar to what Mr. Chambers was just saying, we've seen, in the history of the development of the organic sector, the issue of the private certifications that come in. Retailers are often the first movers in this. They respond to either what they see as a way to differentiate themselves from their competitors, or perhaps to consumer demands. They introduce a new system of certification and verification. Many of today's food safety requirements are based on what the British retail council introduced as a collective—