A new made-in-Manitoba snack food has been named one of the top 12 natural foods at an international gourmet food show in San Francisco.
Buckshots, a roasted buckwheat snack, may have vaulted the crop from obscurity to significant new interest, too.
Many of the Canadian, American, and global buyers attending the 2012 Winter Fancy Food Show this month said they’d either never heard of buckwheat or were familiar with it only as a flour or a cereal ingredient, said Keith Murphy, president of Stone Milled Specialty Grains, a Fort Whyte-area family business commercializing the snack food.
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“They’ve never seen it as a snack,” said Murphy. “So I think it’s close to a first everywhere.”
Gluten free
Buckshots, made from the gluten-free ancient grain, was recognized in two of the show’s top five food trend categories, and earned special recognition from the show’s Natural Food Merchandisers.
Not bad, considering the Winter Fancy Food Show attracts 1,300 exhibitors and 18,000 new products.
They went hoping mainly to do a “taste test,” said Murphy, adding the show attracts highly sophisticated food buyers from around the world and is a place where new food trends launch.
“San Francisco is a taste tester’s dream,” he said. “We looked at it as a place that would give us the information to say, ‘This is a product that has value and potential,’ or tell us if it didn’t.
“Our results were beyond our expectations by a wide margin.”
Buckshots, made from the dehulled buckwheat seed, come in two flavours — dill pickle and smoky barbecue — plus an unflavoured version that retains the traditional taste of buckwheat. The snack concept was developed last year at the Food Development Centre at Portage la Prairie. Stone Milled Specialty Grains, Murphy’s company, named the product, selected the final product’s flavourings, and is taking on the job of commercializing it.
Personal interest
Murphy’s interest was spurred from his own knowledge and interest in special crops as an agricultural research consultant, plus knowing the health benefits of buckwheat. Although not a widely consumed food in this part of the world, buckwheat has an 8,000-year history as a healthy food. Its highly available protein has one of the highest amino acid scores among plant sources, making it a great choice for those seeking healthy alternatives to traditional proteins.
“Buckwheat’s long history as a healthy grain alternative makes this an ideal choice for our business,” said Murphy.
Stone Milled Specialty Grains (www.stone-milled.com) is a family-owned business doing small-batch custom milling of other gluten-free products such as wild rice.
If Buckshots fly, they’ll be a value-added food product to boost consumption of what has historically been a commodity crop sold into export markets. Manitoba buckwheat has been traditionally exported to the Japanese market to be processed into soba noodles. But sales to Japan have fallen off recently, and annual buckwheat acreage has declined from a high of 25,000 in 2000 to less than 5,000.
“We’re hoping to help stabilize the crop by developing a new market for it,” said Murphy.
Emerging capacity
The company also aims to take advantage of emerging capacity for further processing of buckwheat in Manitoba by working with smaller-scale processors.
Buckshots are not yet available commercially in Manitoba but should be on store shelves within a couple of months, and the company is planning a North American-wide product launch, said Murphy.
Buckshots was developed with support of the Manitoba buckwheat industry and funding from the governments of Manitoba and Canada through the Growing Forward, Strategic Innovation Fund–Advancing Agri-Innovation Program.
