India’s appetite for Canadian pulses and our reliable production laid the foundation upon which acres were able to expand.
About three years ago, Denis Tremorin, the Director of Sustainability at Pulse Canada, was at a conference in Switzerland. Representatives from a large processing company were there talking about plans to build a pea-processing facility, but they were not sure where it should go.
“If you build it in Canada, you’ll get all this data,” Tremorin told them.
Shortly after, they announced plans to build a pea protein plant in Saskatchewan.
While commercial decisions are made for a variety of reasons, since 2017 Pulse Canada has been collaborating with industry and university partners to develop datasets packaged as Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs).
An LCA is a comprehensive methodology used to evaluate the environmental impacts associated with all stages of a product's life – from farm practices through processing, and distribution to disposal or recycling. Importantly, these assessments are conducted on a regional scale. To get accurate data, you need to consider factors like regional climate and farming practices.
Generating datasets like LCAs give our crops and our farmers an advantage and they are a part of a broader strategy to promote the sustainability of Canadian pulses both nationally and internationally.
The data not only supports the environmental claims of pulse-based products, but it also underscores the competitive advantage Canadian pulses have in the global market, thanks to their sustainable production practices and the comprehensive environmental data available for these crops.
LCAs are a strong pitch when you're talking about companies that could invest in Canada. Canada has a good story to tell. Our footprints are very low.
“Our industry started to become more sophisticated, especially in the processing sector,” says Tremorin. “We started to realize that companies are wanting to position their plant-based protein against their competitors’ plant-based proteins. Is there actual useful data for companies and processors wanting to evaluate their own products, or evaluate Canadian pulses as a potential ingredient? Almost no one has this data, so we decided to pursue LCAs.”
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