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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Making potato chips that are better for you

Food industry chows down on canola oil product

By: Laura Rance

Posted: 10/15/2011 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Mark Lennihan / The Associated Press archives Frito Lay�s move to Nexera is radically changing the Prairie canola market. (CP)

Let's face it. When people reach for a bag of potato chips, their main concern is whether they are good -- not whether they are good for them.

And when the snack food companies develop marketing campaigns, they are more likely to tie them in with sponsorships, like for example, a professional sports team, than they are the nutritional profile. Or, for that matter, whether buying those products supports local farmers.

All that said, isn't it nice to know that when you chow down on a bag of Frito Lay's potato chips in Canada you're cheering for the Winnipeg Jets, supporting your local canola industry -- and consuming a vegetable oil that doctors and nutritionists say is good for you?

This is not -- repeat not -- a column recommending all potato chip lovers switch their loyalties over to a certain name brand.

But it is a story about how a big corporation's taste for new ingredients is poised to make one of Canada's biggest agricultural success stories even bigger.

The vegetable oil business has been struggling in recent years with the challenge of getting trans fats out of their cooking processes and products.

Trans fats are created when vegetable oils are hydrogenated, a process that increases their stability for hot oil frying, as well as their shelf life. About 15 years ago, just as the vegetable oil industry had nicely educated consumers about good cholesterol and bad cholesterol and that polyunsaturated vegetable oil products were better for their health than products high in saturated fats such as butter or lard, troubling data began to emerge.

Studies showed hydrogenation created trans fats, which are worse than butter for human health.

The pressure on food processors has been building ever since to get trans fats out of processed foods, which was no easy task. The race was on to find alternative vegetable oils that could hold their stability in commercial fat fryers and not go rancid on the grocery store shelf.

To make a long story short, canola, the main oilseed produced in Canada and still considered a nutritional leader for home use and margarine markets, wasn't up to the task unless it could be hydrogenated.

A Dow AgroSciences research and development team began in 1997 working on a type of canola with a more appropriate fatty-acid profile. The product that emerged was Nexera, a canola that produces an omega-9 oil described nutritionally as "olive oil with half the saturated fat."

But more importantly, from a commercial processing perspective, it offers the desired stability for frying and shelf life.

That was only half the plant breeding battle. Because there were so many genes involved in providing this kind of fatty-acid profile, breeders used traditional backcross plant-breeding techniques to select for the needed quality. Then they had to go through the process of breeding in the yield and agronomic traits that would make it worthwhile for farmers to grow.

While that was taking place, work was underway to persuade the processors this product could meet their needs. Plus, farmers needed special incentives to stray from their tried-and-true traditional canola varieties to a new variety, which, to put it bluntly, sucked when it came to yield.

But all of those simultaneous investments are now paying dividends. Several big names in the food-service sector, such as A&W, Boston Pizza, and Earls started using the product. Improvements in yield have made the product more attractive to growers. Dow now proudly claims it's the most profitable type of canola for farmers to grow.

Then Frito Lay, owned by PepsiCo., the second-largest food company in the world, took notice. Its decision to switch its Canadian potato chip fryers to Nexera and to use a Nexera blend with corn oil for its corn chips, has the canola contractors criss-crossing the Prairies trying to persuade farmers to grow more acres.

Frito Lay uses one billion pounds of oil in North America annually to fry its products. If it switches its U.S. products over too, that one company alone could consume the equivalent of about 10 per cent of Canada's canola crop.

As this market grows to include other major users, industry officials predict the omega-9 canola could eventually make up 25 per cent of Canadian canola production. That's a big deal.

But consumers aren't likely to read about this on any label, much less taste the difference. Because when companies such as Frito Lay make changes to their snack food ingredients, they are painfully aware of the consequences of messing with someone's favourite indulgence. It's almost as bad as taking away a city's hockey team.

Laura Rance is editor of the Manitoba Co-operator. She can be reached at 792-4382 or by email: laura@fbcpublishing.com

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 15, 2011 B11

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