Pure Ontario Quinoa (2014)

Funding: AAC Growing Forward 2 Capacity Building

The Pure Ontario Quinoa market development project will build upon Katan Kitchens mandate as an innovative, health food enterprise that seeks to produce local, high quality SuperFoods in Ontario. Katan Kitchens and its collaborators intend to launch the first local commercial quinoa products in Ontario.

Feedback from some distributors has identified concerns over purity, access, traceability and safety of imported quinoa; especially as demand is outstripping supply.  Accessing a new market and demonstrating a purity and quality differentiation that meet buyer demand can be achieved by the adoption of assurance systems and adding value to foods for health.  By optimizing and leveraging these systems, quinoa will be positioned to access new markets while preventing and reducing risks.

Preliminary research indicates that local Ontario quinoa has higher protein and nutritional profile over commercially available quinoa; creating the opportunity to promote and leverage these unique qualities.  To achieve this, the project team gathered market assessment and feasibility data to evaluate, validate and clarify the key qualities of product differentiation; including high quality, purity and traceability of Ontario grown and processed quinoa products.  

This project will provide the basis to effectively produce business tools to increase market share of a local Ontario Superfood product that has never been previously sold commercially. These business tools will include a quinoa commercialization plan and traceability – purity model. The sharing of the business tools will benefit the Ontario agriculture, agri-food and agri-products industry for other new crops (Superfoods, Ethinc Foods, etc.).