Agriculture committee  It's the variety of products that are on the market now. I always use the example that when you used to walk down the beverage aisle in your average grocery store, it was blue on one side and red on the other. That was really it. There are a lot of products on the market now from sports drinks to bottled water to flavoured bottled water.

Agriculture committee  Absolutely.

Agriculture committee  Yes. I'm unfamiliar with the example you mentioned, but absolutely, and it's not just the beverage sector. It's across food and beverages. Absolutely, it is. Fortification of various food and beverage products has been a growing trend in Europe and the United States as well as in Canada.

Agriculture committee  First, to address the issue of removing certain beverages from schools, we did move on that before. Most of the provinces now have food and beverage guidelines as far as what can or cannot be sold in a school. Our industry, years before even the first province came forward with across-the-board nutrition standards for food and beverages, removed full-calorie beverages, pop, from schools.

Agriculture committee  We are getting there, particularly when it comes to, on our end, offering consumers a wide variety of choice. With the approval of stevia, and working closely on a couple of other ingredients that are coming down the pipeline, our industry is being given the tools now to offer Canadians the array of beverages that are offered to consumers in Europe and the United States.

Agriculture committee  We look forward to continuing to work with members of Parliament on food labelling. It's always quite a contentious issue—

Agriculture committee  Our industry has been advocating for many years to do away with the requirements for importing on the container size simply because we see them as being onerous. Those products eventually do make it to market anyway through other channels and again for consumers to be offered choice, determining what size of container a product comes in we see as little bit outdated, quite frankly.

Agriculture committee  Stevia is certainly a sweetener that our industry is very excited about, to bring more products to market. We have products in the United States, for example, and in Europe, that have been very popular for years. We are very pleased that's been passed and we can now bring those products to market.

Agriculture committee  Let me address the water question first, specifically your question about water consumption. If water is drunk out of a bottle of water or out of your tap, you're still consuming water. We need to hydrate on a daily basis or bad things happen to you health-wise. That water is going to be consumed, regardless.

Agriculture committee  My answer to that would be, again, to bring up the stevia example, as a low-calorie sweetener that our members have been wanting to introduce into Canada. It's continuing down the path of fast-tracking ingredients and safety assessments where we know other parts of the world have already approved these ingredients.

Agriculture committee  Other than the regulatory process, I don't know if I have five asks of the government. One issue, though, that's obviously been coming up quite a bit is the issue of childhood obesity and obesity in general. We spend a considerable amount of time talking to both provincial and federal governments about that issue and putting in the window everything that our industry is doing to address consumer needs and to address the issue of obesity.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Let me begin by expressing my sincere gratitude for the invitation to appear today. We have tremendous respect for the work of your committee and, in particular, we are excited to contribute to your examination of the supply chain. I would like to use this time to tell you a bit more about our industry, the contribution we make in terms of jobs and growth, the valued products we deliver to consumers, and the broader opportunities we create for farming families among others.