The province is spreading $650,000 in funding over three years to help fertilize Nova Scotia's wild blueberry industry.
Agriculture Minister Keith Colwell made the announcement at the Halifax Seaport Market on Tuesday in front of gathered media and industry stakeholders.
The money will help research and development projects in production technology, marketing, branding and packaging initiatives.
"We've never looked in the province at producing a fresh berry as close to year-round as we could possibly get and really promoting the health benefits of wild blueberries," Colwell said after the announcement. "Wild blueberries have probably the best health benefit of anything in the world you can eat and the fact that we have not promoted that very well is something we're going to do more and more. And value-added products, that's where the money is ... in the long term. So, we're very excited about that."
The province is also putting another $250,000 over two years to help fund the annual Wild Blueberry Solutions Challenge, an initiative that encourages people to bring new ideas to creating new blueberry products.
"We're working on a blueberry wine," Colwell said. "We're working on all kinds of other products that would really fit in an international market as well as the local market, so we can have the wild blueberries on more people's tables in Nova Scotia and across the country and around the world."
Brandon Millen of Great Village's Millen Farms was on hand as an example of the kind of innovation the funding hopes to continue. They took part in a pilot project to test a laser and soft sorter system as part of their production this summer.
"Labour's harder and harder to get all the time and definitely in the agriculture sector it's even harder, so by adapting to this technology, it's allowed us to maintain and increase our capacity while not having that strong labour demand," Millen said. "And we need as many people as we can get. It's eased the pressure on labour during the month of the harvest.
"Sustainability and investing in the future is really what we're chasing every day."
Barron Blois, president of the Wild Blueberry Association of Nova Scotia said Tuesday's investment will help producers do market research to explore their options. More growers are looking to see what they can do with their product instead of totally relying on a processor price.
"We also see the consumption of both wild and high-bush blueberries in this country is only about one-and-a-half kilograms a year," Blois said. "We believe that there's significant market to be gained by providing more products than what we had in the past because people in central Canada would probably enjoy these berries more if they had ways to consume them."
Internationally, he said markets in Germany and Japan already taking more than nine million kilograms of wild blueberries a year.
"We know what the potential for frozen blueberries are in those markets so we need to find what's the potential for fresh blueberries. Surely if they can put blueberries in the fresh market from Chile and Peru in our stores, surely we can do something like that. It can't be that complicated."
The winners of the 2018 challenge were also announced: Fundy Drinks Ltd., producer of the Viveau brand of juice beverage, and Jus Nova Agriculture Ltd, which is developing a wild blueberry smoothie using plant-based protein.
Hanspeter Stutz, owner of Domaine de Grand Pre winery, who partnered with Ted Grant to create Fundy Drinks, producer of Viveau, a beverage that combines Nova Scotia fruit with lightly carbonated mineral water, was at the announcement with samples of the drink.
He said Europe has had a similar drink for more than 50 years but the North American market is not aware of it.
"The concept is 50 per cent juice, pure juice, nothing added, and 50 per cent mineral water," Stutz said.
The water comes from Middleton's Spa Springs Mineral Water Co.
"They have an incredible bottling line. They bottle us 5,000 bottles an hour. We bring the juice, it is Pasteurized, and then we mix the juice there with their water and it goes to the bottle."
The products are in Sobeys, will soon be in Costco and he's just heard that Loblaws is going to take Viveau into 250 of their stores,
It will help Nova Scotia's industry to have a government push on the marketing side to help move product where in the past a push purely on production would lead to oversupply, Stutz said.
