Building food production and value-added agriculture capacity across Canada

Helping Canada achieve its full opportunity to make more food at home means building a strong, supportive and collaborative ecosystem—including strengthening market competitiveness, attracting more capital, and building a strong skills and talent pipeline. Protein Industries Canada works with Canada’s food production and value-added agriculture industry to help the country reach its potential in each of these areas through its Capacity Building program, which works across eight priority areas to complement investments into R&D.

The eight priority areas include:

• Market and Ecosystem Insights: Help project partners and the wider Canadian plant-based ecosystem identify marketing opportunities, adapt to customer needs, expand market reach, and foster innovation.
• Innovation Infrastructure: Across the sector, there is a need for increased access to research and product-scaling infrastructure.
• Access to Talent, Labour and Skills: We estimate the sector needs an additional 17,000 people to achieve the goals set out in The Road to $25 Billion. This demonstrates both a need and a great opportunity.
• Supportive Regulatory Framework: There is an opportunity to modernize Canada’s regulatory system to support continued innovation of plant-based foods, specifically for it to be more responsive and timely and to offer harmonization of regulations with other jurisdictions.
• An Inclusive Sector that Brings Benefit to Every Canadian: Protein Industries Canada is committed to the inclusion of Indigenous People and new Canadians into the opportunity presented by the growth of the plant-based sector, contributing to Economic Reconciliation and the social well-being of all Canadians.
• Access to Capital: We estimate that an additional $4 to 6 billion will need to be invested into the sector to help Canadian companies scale up their processing and manufacturing operations.
• Sustainability: Canada is known for its sustainable crop production. We need to continue to identify the right metrics and reporting to advance our sustainability claims throughout the value chain.
• Global Presence: International partners are an important part of reaching the goals of The Road to $25 Billion. Protein Industries Canada will work with our federal and provincial partners to advance Canada as the preferred place to do business with and invest, while creating opportunities for our industry partners to make new connections.

Three new projects were approved during the 2025-26 fiscal year, representing at total investment of $6.4 million, of which Protein Industries Canada committed $4.3 million. This included the announcement of a new project under the area of Innovation Infrastructure. A cross-Canada collaboration, the project is an opportunity for the country to optimize and accelerate pea breeding through AI and data analysis.

The 2025-26 fiscal year also marked the launch of the Strengthening the Canadian Supply Chain program. This program was launched to help Canadian companies remain competitive in the wake of the ongoing trade uncertainties and growing tariffs; it focuses on supporting Canadian manufacturers and processors in creating or reformulating products for the Canadian market using Canadian ingredients. By the end of the fiscal year, a total of 14 projects had been announced as taking part in the program—representing companies from across Canada.

Later in the fiscal year, in August 2025, Protein Industries Canada launched the Asia-Pacific Market Entry Program, in partnership with Singapore’s Nurasa. Designed to support Canadian plant-based ingredient and food companies in preparing their products for launch in the Asia-Pacific region, the program accelerates market entry by offering tailored market insights, product development and formulation support, and access to Nurasa’s state-of-the-art facilities and network of commercialization partners. By the end of the fiscal year, one company had been announced as participating in the program.

As more projects continue to roll out under the Capacity Building program and each of its sub-programs, Canada will see wider opportunity at home and abroad.