First of all, I'll apologize for my lack of French.
I'm the executive director of BioFoodTech in Prince Edward Island. I'll talk about that first of all, and then I'll talk about FOODTECH Canada, which is a network of food technology centres.
First of all, BioFoodTech is an organization that provides technical support for the food and bioscience industry in Prince Edward Island regionally and nationally, and it does some international work as well. We're owned by the Province of Prince Edward Island, but we're funded only about 40% by the province, so we do cost recovery work on top of that to balance our budget. The type of work that we do, similar to other food technology centres around the country, is technical support for the food industry. We are scientists, technologists, and engineers working on behalf of industry and with industry on industry-funded projects.
This is in common with many other organizations around the country. I'll take a national perspective and really talk about all of the centres collectively, rather than just BioFoodTech, to help you understand what we have in Canada to support the industry for value-added food product development and technical support.
As you can see, there is a whole range of centres here. Most provinces have at least one centre, some have two centres. The only exception, New Brunswick, does not have a food centre. It has RPC, which is more engineering. British Columbia does not have a food technology centre, but it is in fact working on a new food technology centre at the moment—actually probably more than one.
We're very much similar to each other, but also very different. Many of them are owned by the provincial government, some are private, and some are institutes within universities.
The combined resources, then, of these centres—and this accounts for nine out of the 12 at the moment, as we're waiting for other information to come in—are 309 highly qualified scientists, technologists, and engineers; $220 million in building infrastructure; lots of processing and analytical equipment; and quite a large area of pilot plant. Each year, the centres collectively work with 870 companies, deliver $24 million in industry contracts, introduce 370 new products to market, and hold manufacturing technology workshops.
In terms of the types of services we provide, we're scientists, technologists, and engineers, so what we do is we work as the technical department for many food companies. Most food companies do not have technical people on staff. They don't have scientists or technologists on staff. This certainly accounts for most of the small and medium companies. The larger companies, of course, would, but the smaller ones don't. So we work as their technical department and help them to do product development, and solve problems and find equipment for them, that type of thing.
How do the food technology centres fit into the innovation ecosystem? We are the primary innovators. There was a study done a couple of years ago by KPMG on behalf of the Food Processing Industry Roundtable and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. What they found in their study was this is where the primary innovation is done: it's industry working with the food technology centres, because working together we can provide results and help to the industry in the short term. Our turnaround is two months to two years typically.
The scientific people we have working are “industrial-strength Ph.D.s”, basically Ph.D.s who are not interested in publishing, they're interested in working with the industry and helping to provide solutions to them.
The universities are a very important part of the innovation ecosystem, but their time frame is much longer. You're typically talking about five to 10 years before the results are commercialized. There's more of a priority towards publication, which the food technology centres typically do not do because their work is confidential.
What impedes innovation in Canada? Well, we basically don't have a strong culture of innovation within the value-added food processing industry, and 90% of the companies do not have a relationship with the food technology centres to help them to develop new products. One of the issues caused by that is that there's a huge trade deficit in value-added food products. According to CAPI, it's $8 billion. There are different measures of that, but it's a big number, and it's growing. Part of that is because of the lack of development and the lack of investment in innovation.
We are working every day to try to recruit new companies to come and work with us to develop their technologies, to do workshops and new product development. Our tag line at BioFoodTech is “concept to pilot to market”. What we like is to have companies come to us with ideas before they've developed them very far so that we can help them through the process of figuring out whether their ideas have any potential, and help them through the whole process.
I thank you. That's my opening statement.