“Our technology will encapsulate the fish oil, so that it looks like a powder, and this can and has been taken and incorporated into a number of products,” says Joanna Lane, Marketing Production Manager at Ocean Nutrition.

Ocean has a long list of major product partners, including Unilever, PepsiCo (Tropicana), Coca-Cola (Minute Maid), Lassondre, Danone, J.M. Smucker, Nestle, Heinz, Amway, Pfizer, Weston, Allied Bakeries, Webber Naturals, and Marks & Spencer.

“To date, our MEG-3 food ingredient has been added to over 30 food applications including milk, yogurt, juice, bread, cookies, chocolate, margarine, ice cream and tortilla wraps,” says Lane.

“Ocean Nutrition is a world class player,” says Jones. “They are the leading Omega-3 company in North America, and likely a leader in the entire world.”

Indeed, with sales of $125 million in 2008, and revenue growth of 30 per cent annually sustained over the past seven years, Ocean Nutrition is at the head of the pack. According to market research firm, Packaged Facts, global retail sales of Omega-3 enhanced food and beverage products are expected to reach $8 billion (U.S.) by 2012, and new food product launches in Omega- 3 rose above 460 in 2008.

Ocean Nutrition is not the only business in Canada that has capitalized on the nutraceutical market. Neurodyn, Inc., a biotech startup incubating at the National Research Council of Canada’s Institute for Nutrisciences and Health (NRC-INH), recently received $5.2 million in funding to support the development of diagnostic and therapeutic products to treat neurodegeneration.

NRC-INH houses an additional five startups, which are utilizing some form of natural product to achieve their objectives. Chemaphor, for example, explores commercial opportunities with carotenoid oxidation products, and Phyterra Bio deals with the development of novel health care products derived from a microalgae. Other companies at NRC-INH include Phyterra Yeast, Nautilus Biosciences Canada and the Atlantic Centre for Bioactive Valuation (ACBV).

In addition to working hand-in-hand with these biotech startups, NRC-INH scientists have also identified a number of plant extracts with potential to protect Canadians from neurological diseases, metabolic disorders and to boost immune health.

According to Lisa Lafontaine, Communications Advisor for NRC-INH, scientists at the cluster aided Stirling Products North America, an animal health company based in P.E.I., in developing a test to scientifically assess actual immune simulation of natural additives in animal feed for poultry, pigs, cattle and aquaculture. They also licensed technologies that naturally reduce cholesterol and can be inserted into a nutraceutical or functional food product without the negative side effects of commonly prescribed statins, to Canadian companies like Omnia Foods Ltd. The centre also has a partnership with Merck Frosst, which funds a pediatric asthma research project initiated by an NRC-INH scientist who looks for natural bioactive compounds to prevent, slow the progression of and treat immunity disorders and inflammation.

Merck is also involved with the Richardson Centre for Functional Foods and Nutraceuticals, which has grown from only six people to 150 in the span of three years.

“We’re getting increasing interest from pharma companies, in addition to the work that we’re already involved with,” says Jones.

Among its successes, the Richardson Centre undertook the clinical trials that underpinned the biggest launch in the history of WhiteWave Foods, Inc., the company responsible for Silk soy milk. The soy milk now contains plant sterols (which can not be sold in Canada), a natural cholesterol-buster.

“In Canada, we really do have a lot of great research going on,” says Jones. “One place, aside from here at the centre in Manitoba that is particularly strong, is Guelph.”

The Human Nutraceutical Research Unit (HNRU) was established at the University of Guelph in 1998 out of a need to meet the growing demand for nutraceutical education and to perform clinical or human trials to show the efficacy of products in this area.

“At that point, most products on the market only printed health claims, not proof,” says Hilary Tulk, Clinical Trials Manager at HNRU. “So now, if you’re an industry company and you want to print a health claim for a product, you can come to us.”

At Guelph, health claims can be separated into two categories: general health claims or product-specific health claims.

“General health claims are what you would see on a box of Cheerios, for example, that say it may help lower cholesterol. By meeting certain criteria that Health Canada has put forward, perhaps a per-serving ration of soluble fibre, you can include in your product a general health claim,” says Tulk.

With a product-specific claim, she explains, one would have to definitively prove that the product does something. At Guelph, a clinical trial can prove the claim, and the company can say that it does help to lower cholesterol.

Being a university facility, the HNRU doesn’t stick exclusively to clinical trials.

“We have an undergrad and graduate course that is functional food and nutritional science,” says Tulk.

Within the program, students, who fill the program’s 30 spaces consistently, have the ability to create their own products and take them through from conception to marketing. This has become a very good microcosm for exploring industry trends.

“One year there were a lot of soy products, Omega-3 comes up a lot, and last year there were a lot of students trying to develop products for people with Type 2 diabetes,” says Tulk. “I have even been able to see the transition from delivering things through capsule format to creating food products with added value. People don’t want to be constantly taking pills and supplements; just looking at the food itself and improving it has been a big switch.”

To cope with the needs of students and the demand for clinical trials, the HNRU consists of several clinical trial suites, and “a metabolic test kitchen, which is a state-of-the-art kitchen with scales and appliances which we use for preparing food in order to control a diet precisely,” says Tulk. In clinical trials, diet control can last for as long as a month. The HNRU also houses a teaching lab with a sensory facility. Sensory testing comes in handy for taste testing.

“Does adding calcium to some orange juice change the taste or texture? Can people detect the difference between the juice with and without the calcium?” Tulk asks.

With strong educational infrastructure set to fill growing jobs in the sector, and support centres such as the Richardson Centre and NRC-INH, the industry looks strong. But, as always, there are challenges.

Product approvals can be slow, according to Jones. The quickest method is called the Natural Health Products Directorate. No company knows the difficulties with approvals better than Forbes Medi-Tech, a Canadian manufacturer of nutraceutical products.

“We’ve had applications sitting in there for many years, trying to get them through their processes,” says David Stewart, Vice-President, Regulatory Affairs. “I think we have something along the lines of 14 applications sitting there waiting to be approved, and a number of other companies are facing the same thing.”

One issue is that Health Canada views plant sterols as a drug, therefore, getting a product approved for sale in Canada that utilizes these sterols is unlikely.

In order to change this regulatory hurdle, Stewart, Jones and a host of other industry leaders formed the Collaboration for Advancement of Plant Sterols in Canada (CAPSIC). Members of this group include academics (leading researchers in food, nutrition and economics), as well as large industry members.

In October, members of CAPSIC traveled to Ottawa to meet with representatives from Health Canada and discuss the possibility of changing the government’s outlook on plant sterols. As of print time, there were no changes.

Fortunately for the rest of the industry, and thanks to Canada’s expansive geography and plentiful resources, plant sterols are but a small area of the nutraceutical field. In this field, there are lots of resources to choose from.

“The mussel industry here in P.E.I. is very big, and we have these Tunicates that are attaching themselves to the mussel catches and to the nets and hulls of the ships. It’s time-consuming and costly for the fishermen to remove these Tunicates. We’re looking at them to see if there are properties in them to use for nutraceutical purposes. If they’re already having to deal with these things, perhaps there is some way to get value out of them,” says Lafontaine.

This innovative approach to utilizing the many resources at their disposal, not only by NRC-NIH, but many Canadian companies in the FFNHP industry, is what keeps the sector growing.

“The global nutrition market is pegged at around $300 billion,” says Lafontaine. “Being such a vast land, we have much potential for bioresources, and we can take a hold of a significantly larger share of this market in the coming years.”