Business Development Centre

Program Details

Short presentations will be provided by industry members associated with the following idea:

Sustainability: As defined by Pulse Industry Value Chain Members

A 30 minute panel discussion will follow the presentations.

Panel Speakers

Dr. François Eudes - Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

Dr. François Eudes is the Director Research, Development and Technology of the Science and Technology (S&T) Branch at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) since December 2015, for sites located in Alberta. He leads a large group of staff in two research and development centres (Lethbridge and Lacombe) and two farms (Beaverlodge and Vauxhall), and manages the resources associated with their science programs in seven sector strategies. Dr. François Eudes is AAFC’s lead for the Forage and Beef Sector Strategy, and the science lead for five cross sectoral files: honey bee, antimicrobial resistance and antimicrobial use, Gene editing, bioinformatics and Big Data and microbiome. He has been contributing to the digitalization of science effort and leads the science-based mission “Accelerating Digital Transformation of Agriculture and Agri-Food”. He represents AAFC on various stakeholder engagements, and is the Science and Technology Branch director lead for the Pulse Cluster. Dr. François Eudes joined the federal government as a scientist with AAFC in 2000. His work focused on developing enabling technologies for cereal crops, such as cell culture, DNA and protein delivery for engineering and editing plant genome. Dr. François Eudes completed a degree in Agricultural Engineering in Nancy, France. He then continued with his Doctoral degrees in Plant Biology at Université Laval, Québec, Canada. Before joining the Government of Canada, he worked for two years as a post-doctoral fellow at AAFC-Lethbridge.

Michelle Finley-Roquette

Michelle Finley is a veteran government and public affairs professional with over 17 years of experience in stakeholder engagement within diverse sectors including not-for-profit, government and private industry.

She has been with Roquette since early 2020 as their first Communications and Public Affairs Manager for Canada. Advocating for Roquette and the entire plant-based protein sector in Canada has become a passion for Michelle and she has gone all in on seeking new connections to accelerate expansion of the country’s domestic pulse processing capacity.

Michelle was recently elected to the Board of Directors for the Canadian Pulse and Special Crops Trade Association and serves on the Communications and Marketing Committee with Plant-Based Foods Canada. She is also a member of the Province of Manitoba’s Project ASPIRE Water and Wastewater Roundtable (part of the Manitoba Protein Advantage) and represents Roquette as an industry advisor for Food & Beverage Manitoba’s newly created Economic Advisory Table.

Dan Oliver - Nortera Foods

Dan is the Agriculture Technical Programs Specialist with Nortera Foods, formerly known as Bonduelle. Dan joined Bonduelle in 2015 after 4 years of sales and agronomy experience in the agricultural retail industry. In his role, Dan supports Nortera’s agriculture teams across Canada and the United States on various agronomic issues while facilitating continuous improvement projects in vegetable crop production and supporting various regulatory and customer compliance initiatives. Dan lives on, and operates, a 300 acre hobby cash crop farm with his wife and two young children near Strathroy, ON.

Nicole Bamber-University of British Columbia (on behalf of Pulse Canada)

Nicole Bamber is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia in the Food Systems PRISM Lab. Her research focuses on life cycle assessment of Canadian field crops, to account for all resource use and environmental emissions throughout their supply chains. Through her research, she aims to optimize Canadian agricultural land use for nutritional and environmental outcomes. She has worked with Pulse Canada to collect regionalised life cycle inventory data from pulse farmers, in order to conduct regionalised life cycle assessments of Canadian pulse products, for use in benchmarking and comparison to other products and regions of production.

Producer Group Representatives to be announced shortly

Dr. Peter Pauls - University of Guelph

Dr. Peter Pauls has 39 years of experience in university research and teaching and has held leadership roles, including:

• Acting Associate Dean Academic for OAC
• Chair of the Department of Plant Agriculture
• President of the Canadian Society of Plant Physiologists

His research has encompassed cellular and molecular studies of embryogenesis, pathogen-induced stress, agronomic trait expression in field crop plants, plant genomics, bioproducts and bean breeding. His work has addressed Common Bacterial Blight in Phaseolus vulgaris, Fusarium resistance in corn, Powdery Mildew resistance in Cannabis, seed quality in beans and soybean, and yield related traits in canola. He became a registered Plant Breeder in 2006 and has developed, with others, more than 50 novel, navy, kidney, pinto, black and cranberry dry bean varieties; more than 15 of which are currently under licensed production in Canada and the USA. In 2022 the dark red kidney bean variety Dynasty, developed by Tom Smith and him, received the Seed of the Year Award. He has advised more than 50 graduate students to the completion of their MSc or PhD degrees, many of whom hold prestigious positions in academic or government institutions, or private industry.

Dr. Judith Burstin - UMR Agroecology of INRA Dijon

Dr Judith Burstin is Director of research at UMR Agroecology of INRA Dijon. With a background in agronomy, quantitative genetics and breeding, she has acquired competencies in genomics and post-genomics methodologies. Her research focuses on pea plant adaptation to low-input farming systems. Since 2020, she is deputy-head of UMR Agroecology, in charge of the Legume Ecophysiology and Genetics group. She authored or co-authored more than 50 papers in peer-reviewed international journals. She has been coordinating several large projects such as the International Pea Genome Sequencing Consortium, the multi-disciplinary French “Investment for the Future” projects PEAMUST and SPECIFICS.

Dr. Chris Marinangeli- Protein Industries Canada

Chris Marinangeli has a PhD in human nutrition sciences and is a registered dietitian. He is a scientist and food industry professional across consumer-packaged goods and the Canadian agriculture sector. He is currently Director of the Regulatory Centre of Excellence at Protein Industries Canada. Prior positions include Senior Director of Research and Regulatory Affairs at Pulse Canada, Senior Manager of Nutritional Science and Regulatory Affairs at Kellogg Canada. Chris is experienced at leveraging human nutritional sciences to address knowledge gaps that create new opportunities for sectoral differentiation and growth. He is also a recognized expert in national and international food regulations with expertise in navigating health sciences and nutrition science, technology, and consumer insights and equity for developing strategies and tactics to meet sectoral needs. He is currently on the scientific advisory committee for the Canadian Federation of Dietetic Research.

It is expected that submitted oral presentations will be 15-20 minutes.

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Cost: $50.00/person

Tour Information:

Tours are concurrent

Time: 10:30am - 1:30pm (includes lunch)

Options:

1. University of Windsor-Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research (GLIER)
   • Limit 40 people
2. Tour of Processing facilities and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Harrow Research and Development Centre
   • Limit 40 people