Organic Food Booms in Canada

The Gazette (Montreal)
August 8, 2001Act naturally: Amid growing concerns about food safety,
shoppers turn to organic food

By: JULIAN ARMSTRONG

Cast a glance at the dairy counter of a Montreal supermarket and you might
catch a piece of food history in the making.

Organic yogurts, milks, sour creams and cheeses made by Liberty Products
Inc., a Quebec dairy company known for its top-quality yogurt, are selling
briskly as part of a burgeoning move toward organic foods.

Local advocates of organics, the popular term for food produced without
chemical aids or genetically modified ingredients, are calling Liberty's
products a breakthrough because the dairy company is a mainstream
manufacturer with many conventionally made foods on the market.

Liberty's organic products started appearing several years ago, beginning
with large (750-gram) containers of plain yogurt, but followed shortly after
by milk, sour cream and, last year, small (175-gram) fruit-flavoured yogurt.
This year, as more and more of the products moved beyond health-food stores
into supermarkets, 500-gram containers of all the yogurts appeared.
Other product lines are devoting more space to organics, too. Capitalizing
on the new acceptance of organics in supermarkets are 20 President's Choice
grocery products, which appeared in Loblaws in May and are now also in
Provigo and Maxi stores.

Loblaws added these foods to its sizable natural and organic-food
departments called Soins Naturels. Best-sellers are its wheat cereal, jams
and green tea. Other items include oils, frozen vegetables, flour, juices,
cookies and coffee.

Newer IGA stores, such as the Nuns' Island and Ile Bizard locations, have
long counters stocked with organic foods. Pierre Labelle, grocery
vice-president of Sobeys, which supplies IGA outlets, says customers are
demanding organics.

Metro offers a wide variety of organics throughout its stores. Spokesman
Annie Langlois said organics' higher prices stop some shoppers, but demand
is growing.

The evidence seems to concur.

The federal government's agriculture department recently estimated the
growth in retail sales of organics at 20 per cent a year for the past five
years. Canada's retail sales of these foods now total $1 billion a year,
according to the Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors.
To be sure, it's still small when compared with total annual retail food
sales of $57 billion, said council official Jeanne Cruikshank from her
Halifax office. Small, but growing.

Globally, sales of these products are also climbing, by 25 per cent a year
in Britain, the world leader, and by an average of 10 to 15 per cent when
figures from the United States, Europe, Canada and Japan are combined. Major
British food chain Sainsbury's has staked out much of the West Indies island
of Grenada to grow its organic produce. China, where large acreages of
previously unused farmland are free of pesticide residues, is becoming a
source for these foods.

Interest in naturally grown food "is skyrocketing," said Sidney Ribaux of
Equiterre, a group of 60 market gardeners who supply Montreal customers with
weekly baskets of organic fruit and vegetables. Demand is so strong, his
growers can't handle any more customers this season.

The numbers show consumers are interested in both health and food safety,
Ribaux said. Worried about European livestock illnesses, microbial
contamination of water and whether genetically engineered food is safe, more
and more shoppers are turning to these foods, produced without pesticides,
herbicides, fungicides, hormones or genetically modified organisms.
Organic shoppers pay steep prices, often 50 per cent more than they would
pay for conventional products. Liberty's organic yogurt in the 500-gram
container is priced from $2.69 to $2.89 in supermarkets, compared with its
plain, conventional variety at $1.89 to $2.29. Its organic milk sells for
about $2.19 per litre, compared with Lactantia's regular product at $1.36 to
$1.46 and Sealtest's milk at $1.19 to $1.30.

Organic fresh fruits and vegetables are similarly priced higher than for
regular produce, because organic farmers do much more of their work by hand,
so more hands are needed.

And the sizes of many foods continue to be smaller than is customary with
conventional agriculture, acknowledges Robert Marcotte, an organic grower
from Saint-Thomas-de-Joliette who sells at Atwater Market.
But committed shoppers accept high prices and small sizes. "People are
becoming more conscious of the real price of good food, and they know that,
with our methods, we are protecting the planet," he said.
Again, the surveys agree.

A recent Statistics Canada poll found that the majority of Canadians are
willing to spend more for chemical-free food, and 25 per cent would spend up
to 50 per cent more.

A Quebec survey in February, conducted for Quebec Science and Protegez-Vous
magazines, found more than 75 per cent of respondents preferred to pay more
for organic food rather than consume cheaper products. Their chief concerns:
mad-cow disease in Europe, pesticides and fertilizers in food, hormones and
antibiotics in beef and genetically modified organisms, which contain genes
transplanted from a different species of plant or animal.

Five years ago, it wasn't possible to completely dispel these worries by
eating organic, because use of the term organic ("biologique" in French,
often translated as biologic in English) on food packaging has only been
regulated by the federal and Quebec governments for the past two years.
But now, for a food to be called organic, each ingredient must be cleared by
one of six Quebec organizations licensed to certify products. You'll see
certifications such as Quebec Vrai, O.C.I.A. and Guarantie Bio stamped on
approved goods; some Ontario or U.S. equivalents are also recognized here.
Unfortunately, finding organic food isn't always easy because local supplies
of organic produce are limited. Most of Quebec's organic growers grow grain
and not fruit and vegetables, with the result that organic products on sale
here typically come from small companies based in Ontario, British Columbia
and the U.S., especially California.

Some locally grown produce can be found at Atwater Market, where La Ferme
Michaca, run by the Lassau family of Athalstan, sells organically grown
chicory, spinach, lettuce and onions. (The farm also operates a stand at
Jean Talon Market year-round.)

More organic produce could come from British Columbia because so many
growers are producing so much of it, says organic seed producer Dan Jason of
Salt Spring Island, B.C.

Andre Turenne, who represents 315 Montreal-region market gardeners, toured
Vancouver food stores recently and calculated that 50 per cent of the city's
chain-store produce counters are organic and prices average only 20 per cent
higher than for "conventional" fruit and vegetables.

In contrast, only a handful of the members of his Association des Jardiniers
Maraichers produce organics - although, Turenne says, most are using far
fewer chemical aids than they did only a few years ago.

"The demand for organic food is definitely there," he said from his Central
Market office. "And growers always go where the demand is."

- Atwater Market will be host to about 50 organic producers the weekend of
Aug. 25 and 26 as part of the market's annual harvest festival. Aided by the
Union des Producteurs Agricoles, producers of fruit, vegetables and
processed foods will take over the street beside the big west-end market to
set up stands, stage demonstrations and offer tastings.

- Julian Armstrong can be reached by E-mail at
<jarmstrong@thegazette.southam.ca>