I'm glad you asked that question. I wanted to respond to Mr. Van Kesteren's question earlier.
Maritime Steel's division in Prince Edward Island, where we do stainless steel work, has developed a continuous cooker for the seafood industry, for example, which continuously processes shellfish and dramatically improves the productivity of a fish plant operation. We've developed that on our own; we had little or no help from a government agency. We have come to the point where we're likely to patent it. Our prototype is still in the shop. We've sold two other units and we're about to build the third. By the third one we got it right; we know how to build them now. We expect to be able to sell the product internationally. In fact, we'll be marketing it in Chile in the coming months.
We've also entered into a partnership with a British firm in developing a stunner for shellfish. When seafood is cooked these days, you'll find the market is demanding uncooked lobster tails. If you went into a processing plant and saw a lobster trying to crawl around without his legs and without his tail, you would think that might be deemed to be inhumane. What our stunner does is allow that animal to die quickly and effectively without having to go through that kind of processing. That product is under development now.
We've been working through ACOA—though we haven't got this off the ground yet—trying to rejuvenate the steel industry in Nova Scotia and working with the steel foundries association in the U.S. and the Canadian Foundry Association to do some real research and development here at Dalhousie in partnership with ourselves. They have a scanning electron microscope that we can't afford; we have a mass spectrometer that they don't have. So we're sharing that high-priced capital equipment and our expertise; we have three metallurgists on staff, two from Quebec with master's degrees, and another fellow. We're ready, willing, and able to get on with some really effective R and D. But I must admit, I don't know how to go about it; I don't know how to approach the government and take advantage of what's out there. It may be my fault for not educating myself well enough on it, but I would like some help, because we've got a real opportunity to direct our capital investment in the future into areas that are going to dramatically improve the population.
We've grown the foundry threefold in the last four years, and we've done that because we've become very efficient at what we do. We've put some capital into the process and we've educated our workforce and we've partnered with our unions to become more effective. So we're on the move and we want to continue to do that.