City Slickers

Story by Jennifer Cockrall-King and Terry Juzak

Seeds of Success

Jennifer and Terry see how a simple canola seed is heated, crushed and pressed into a wide array of products.

As we turn off of Highway 3 into an industrial neighbourhood in Lethbridge, we feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland driving through an enormous grocery store. Brands like Hostess Frito-Lay, Maple Leaf Foods, Lamb Weston and Lucerne are plastered on huge buildings. We’re in the heartland of food processing and we’re on a mission to find Canbra Foods. It has the distinction of being the first company in the world to market canola oil, it is 100% Canadian-owned and its Canola Harvest brand of margarine and oil can be found on grocery shelves across Canada and in 13 other countries, as far away as New Zealand, Korea, China, Japan and Dubai.

Canola is truly a made-in-Canada success story. It’s a descendant of rapeseed, an Old World oil seed that thrived in fertile prairie fields. Rapeseed, however, was usable only as cattle feed and oil for industrial lubricant; its oil was unsafe for human consumption. In the early ’70s, University of Manitoba plant breeders were det-ermined to extract an edible oil from this plant by breeding out the harmful fatty acids. They succeeded in creating canola, a term coined later in 1978 as a contraction of “Canadian oil low acid.” This new plant breed produced oil with an ex-tremely heart-healthy profile that was low in saturated fats. It’s Canada’s answer to olive oil and those intense yellow fields are now an icon of the prairie landscape.

Canbra Foods takes up about five city blocks, so it’s easy to spot. Our guide is Phillip Huff, a research associate. Our tour starts in a conference room and Huff talks us through the process from canola seed to margarine and oil with samples at each major step. We start at the beginning as he passes around small jars filled with thousands of tiny, round, black, brown and dark yellow seeds.

Extracting oil from canola is actually a fairly straightforward process. It just seems a little daunting on the scale at which Canbra Foods operates – 12 metric tonnes of seed can be processed daily at peak operation. The canola comes from all over Canada and the northern U.S. The quality of each truckload is graded by hand immediately as it enters the yard by crushing a sample with a handheld roller. From there, the seed is either stored in silos or sent straight to be heated, crushed and pressed. Heating helps soften the outer husk and it also intensifies the canola “perfume” that wafts around the plant. Later, we get to peek inside one of the oil presses, essentially a giant churning meat grinder. As the oil is pressed out, it’s thick and dark green. We don’t linger here, as the noise is deafening, and the heat and intense aromas coming out of the presses are overwhelming.

This first part of the process gets about 60% to 70% of the oil out of the seed. Here in Alberta, the first press is appropriately referred to as the “crude oil.” The other 30% is extracted using an organic solvent.

Having wrung every last bit of oil out of the seed, just “canola meal” remains. This part of the seed is mainly protein. Cattle seem to like the stuff, especially when it’s lightly roasted, so it gets sold to the cattle industry as feed.

The oil continues down its processing chain where things like phosphorus, iron, free fatty acids and chlorophyll are removed. “Our goal is to produce 100% oil,” says Huff. “So we remove all other compounds.” Lastly the oil is cooked at 130ºC (270ºF), in what Huff describes as a “great big still,” until only a pale yellow, clear and odour-free oil remains. From here, the oil can be bottled as canola oil, non-stick spray, even blended with olive oil for a canola-olive oil product, or mixed with a solid fat and emulsified to produce margarine. Our jaws drop as we’re shown a giant warehouse cooler stocked several storeys high with margarine. And this alone is just one month’s worth of margarine, we’re told. Canbra Foods produces over 400,000 metric tonnes of canola products a year.

The tour ends with ... a margarine tasting of course! We taste three different products: Canola Harvest’s non-hydrogenated margarine, a hydrogenated margarine and a new non-hydrogenated margarine with flax seed oil. (Due to its trans fat content, hydrogenated margarine has lost favour with many consumers but it’s still popular with grocery shoppers in Japan – where Canbra Foods exports it.)

As it turns out, there’s a technique to this, and Huff instructs us how to scrape a little margarine from each tub, smear it on a baguette round, pop it in our mouth and “release” the flavour by inhaling through our noses. Admittedly butter-eaters, we start with the non-hydrogenated margarine. We smear, pop, inhale, chew and swallow. It has a creamy, slightly salty start, then we get that light whiff of canola. Next we try the hydrogenated margarine. It’s tasty and creamy, with a nice texture. The creamy temptation of trans fats aside, we like Canola Harvest’s new non-hydrogenated margarine with flax oil the most. The nuttiness of the flax enhances the canola flavour and rounds out saltiness of the margarine and we marvel at the array of products that come from such tiny, little seeds.