Research helps baking ingredients rise to the top: when your niche is applying infrared energy to grains and legumes, chances are your community's strength is research infrastructure.

InfraReady Products Limited, located in Saskatoon, makes 155 products for 95 companies on five continents. The company's niche is using infrared energy to partially pre-cook grains and legumes. The process produces quick cooking cereal grains, legumes and oil seeds which can reduce processing costs for food manufacturers.

"Innovation is the lifeblood of InfraReady Products," says InfraReady president Mark Pickard. "Innovation includes incremental product development and improvement done in-house, as well as the more challenging innovation where new opportunities are researched, developed, and commercialized to create products for new markets, often with the help of outside resources."

Those outside resources are located primarily in Saskatoon, and include Innovation Place and the University of Saskatchewan, the Canadian Light Source synchrotron, the POS Pilot Plant Corporation, the Bio-Processing Centre, Ag-West Bio Inc. and the Food Industry Development Centre.

These facilities provide a broad range of services to clients in the food processing industry. The research and development services are broad and can include helping companies to refine processes and improve productivity.

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Part of being competitive in a global market is the ability to identify new trends and act quickly. A new trend in the agri-food industry is traceability.

"As product traceability becomes increasingly important in food production," Pickard says, "InfraReady's expertise in processing both conventional and organic raw materials will become a competitive advantage. Saskatchewan producers are early adopters of product traceability," he says, "and we foresee having this extend to the farm level."

Saskatchewan is Canada's largest supplier of raw agricultural materials to national and international markets. It only stands to reason that food manufacturing is big business in Saskatchewan.

"The Saskatchewan agricultural economy grew from the desire to capture the value of grain," Pickard continues. "And, with whole grain consumption a positive nutritional trend, InfraReady is poised for continued success."