Big in Japan: CanMar grain products is giving Asia the facts on flax: speaking from his office at CanMar grain products in Regina, Cecil Werner pauses dramatically while describing his ongoing work overseas, but the reason really has more to do with shifting time zones than anything else.

"I just got home from Japan on the weekend," explains Werner, CanMar's President and CEO, who was there attending a seminar hosted by the Canadian embassy in Tokyo on the health benefits of flaxseed. While there, he took the opportunity to follow up with some of CanMar's major customers, including Nippon Flour Mills , one of the largest companies of its kind in Japan. "It was important to be there in person," Werner says.

A little jet lag is a small price to pay when one looks at the big picture for CanMar. Werner made a previous visit to the Tokyo embassy in October 2005 for a similar event, a reception involving Saskatchewan Premier Lorne Calvert and featuring a taste of the company's roasted flaxseed, its signature product.

CanMar is literally sowing seeds for the future in a burgeoning Asian market that is increasingly conscious of the need to maintain healthy eating. The key fact is there is fat that is actually good for you--polyunsaturated fat, known as essential fatty acids (EFA) which are found in flaxseed.

Seventy-three per cent of the fat in flax is in the form of EFA, and more than half of this is alpha-linolenic acid or omega-3 essential fats.

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These so-called "good fats" are identified as essential because our bodies need them but are unable to produce them on their own, and must acquire them through our diet. Fish is a major source and flax is another.

Enter CanMar, which produces a line of roasted, milled, and pasteurized Saskatchewan flaxseed. After securing a foothold in Japan with Tokyo-based distributor C-Pro a decade ago, it earned the attention of Nippon Flour Mills and established a relationship in 2002. "Being a very large company, Nippon expressed an interest and sent some technical people over here to learn about flaxseed and its various health benefits," Werner says.

This led to Nippon contributing advice and technical expertise to the development of CanMar's new Regina processing plant. It's the centrepiece of the company's efforts to pursue a large consumer base in Asia by supplementing the nutritional role of fish, particularly in conjunction with an increasingly Western-style diet.

"We're expanding our market base and helping it grow in Japan and other countries as well, including Canada and the U.S.," Werner explains. "Canadians already know a lot more about omega-3s than the Japanese, so it's requiring a lot of education. But it has the potential to become a big market."

At the same time, Werner notes that CanMar is not wholly focused on those over-the-horizon markets.

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"It also provides an opportunity for our farmers to grow a profitable crop," he says. "To become profitable, you have to utilize your resources and it's prudent to diversify your market. That's one reason why we're devoting effort to Japan and other offshore countries."