Sask. plant-based product company to make millions in merger. So what does it do?

A Regina-based company is capitalizing on the appetite for plant-based foods.

Above Foods, which touts itself as a "field-to-fork" company due to its complete supply chain, announced a merger with Bite Acquisition Corporation on Monday. Bite is expected to pay approximately US$44 million in the proposed transaction and Above Foods is set to become a public company on the New York Stock Exchange. 

Above's head office is nestled into Regina's downtown core at The Balfour, but the company has buildings across Canada and the United States, with operating facilities across Saskatchewan employing a little more than 100 workers.

CBC spoke with executive chairman and CEO Lionel Kambeitz on Thursday to learn more. 

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

CBC: How do Above Foods' products compare with meat and other plant-based products when it comes to price?

Kambeitz: We're not in the meat comparison business. There are several billion people in the world that have been eating plant-based diets for hundreds and hundreds of years.

We're really targeting a $200-billion total addressable market. 

We're not in the business of a science experiment here. The foods that we are producing, the foods that we are having grown to our specifications, that we're taking custody of, that we're turning into ingredients and we're turning into CPG (consumer packaged goods) are foods that that have been involved in the consumer pipeline for many, many years: whole seeds, flowers, rolled products, different formulations, simple meals that are being put together.

Prices are very, very comparable to what I would call conventional, but of course it depends. For example, we have regenerative organic certified, which is a higher price, but it's organically grown and it is regeneratively certified.

(Regenerative certification is a holistic standard for soil health, animal welfare and farm worker fairness.)

We have gluten free oats produced to a premium quality that very few people are able to produce to that quality specification.

That will be a little more money, as well, because it's meeting that higher specification, but on what I would call conventional plant-based foods that we sell, we are very competitively priced with the existing industry.

You've mentioned you value food security. What does that mean?

For the first time in Canada, first time in my life now and probably the first time that I can recall, in Canada and the United States there's been empty shelves. COVID-19 made us aware of the fact that food security and the reliability of supply was not guaranteed, and we are very lucky in Canada and the United States to have such good infrastructure that we rarely face that.

Then what came upon us was a new understanding — and it's been 20 or 30 years since this has happened — where food became one of the weapons of war and the result of the Ukrainian crisis. We suddenly had massive shortages and massive spikes in commodities.

That has really awakened people to say, "I want reliable supply, I want absolute, predictable identity preserved quality. I want to know who grew it, how it was grown. I want to know everything about its value chain. I want that quality concern and I want better proteins. I want my my plant-based to have a higher protein count, a more balanced amino acid count." Those are the things that we're able to supply.

We have a complete field-to-fork supply chain. We organize and we originate the crops that we're going to need and we take custody of those. We then we produce an ingredient from them. We then take the ingredient and we produce a product that we sell under private labels or CPG.

If you control the entire supply chain, then you have an opportunity to have surety of supply and surety of quality.

How do you maintain quality while introducing a high protein content?

Here's a good example: quinoa, considered by many to be one of the world's super foods. We have four varietals where we own the germ plasm, which means we own the genetics which originally came from South America and we've Canadianized those varietals over many years. We've increased the protein count by over 20 per cent on those varietals.

We now have the ability to provide quinoa that used to be 14 to 16 per cent protein, and today it's as high as 24 per cent protein through natural breeding.

We have a breeding centre at the University of Saskatchewan. Through natural breeding, year after year you select some of the varietals that you're growing that have higher protein, and you develop a new trait in the plant and that new seed has more protein in it, and you propagate that seed.

What is the plan with the US$44 million doled out to Above Foods in the merger?

The primary use of proceeds are to continue to fund our growth at 61 per cent annual growth. You need capital to be able to fund our growth. We have a track record and a model that we can continue to grow our business at that 61 per cent per year, and we want to do that.

Secondly, we will look for small acquisitions that we can fold into our existing infrastructure, our existing facilities — acquisitions that will make our facilities more efficient — then we can combine the acquisitions into what we're doing so we can expand that way.

[The Bite group] had great experience in CPG, private label and food service. They had an experienced capital team in New York City. They brought to us direct connections and strategic partners in the business to help grow our business. So we felt that the Bite group was a very good choice as a vehicle to be able to go public with Above Foods.