Yes, indeed. In fact, the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development has been quite active in this space over and above what the regional development agencies have been up to.
Since 2017, I can report that ISED has committed up to $203 million to support innovation in Canada's value-added food and beverage processing sector through two avenues: the strategic innovation fund and Innovation Canada's superclusters initiative. Mr. Seppey has already indicated such investments in that regard.
In 2018, as well, there was a Maple Leaf Foods project funded through SIF to build a world-class, value-added poultry processing plant facility in London, Ontario. The SIF funded $20 million toward a $744 million project, and that project is expected to create one of the most technologically advanced poultry plants in the world that will lead on food safety, environmental and animal welfare processes and technologies.
In 2018, we launched a competition under stream 4 of the SIF. It's a competition to spur on consortia coming together to bring different actors around the same ecosystem in such a way that smaller players across the country could interact with bigger players with research components of the ecosystem, and create value and, hopefully, garner new market share.
There were 55 different applicants to that process. Two victors came from that: the Canadian Agri-Food Automation and Intelligence Network and the Canadian Food Innovators Network.