RDAR Delivers $2.3M To Expand Value-Added Plant Protein Market

Mar 20, 2025

PIP Lethbridge Inc. is an ag-tech company that specializes in processing yellow peas. In 2024, it received a $215,000 Sustainable CAP grant through RDAR to assess the feasibility of a more advanced extraction method that preserves protein integrity while eliminating the bitter taste and undesirable textures commonly associated with plant proteins. Compared to existing processing technologies, PIP’s system enhanced process efficiency by 20%, uses less power and water, and reduces maintenance and cleaning time and costs.

PIP’s process innovations directly address the need to enhance the value of primary agricultural products by increasing value-added processing in Alberta. PIP’s processes substantially raise the value of peas from under $1.00/kg to over $8.00/kg.

In the next phase of this initiative, PIP will continue to scale its process and apply new technology to provide real-time processing data. This is expected to maximize protein recovery and minimize losses, increasing productivity and cost efficiencies.

Federal Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, the Honourable Lawrence MacAulay, said: “We’re committed to helping producers add even more value to their operations. These investments in cutting-edge research will allow producers in Alberta to grow their businesses, so they can keep feeding the world while improving their bottom line.”

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids