This is the first article in a two-part series on Québec’s growing plant-based ingredient sector. Part One looks at the region behind that growth, the organic hemp and oat farms of Saguenay Lac Saint Jean. Part two, coming soon, turns to the markets buying what gets produced in the region.
Farmers have spent generations finding buyers for their main crop and quietly discarding whatever did not fit that primary market. Straw was let to decay in the field or burned. Off grade grain went to livestock feed if it went anywhere at all. That pattern is now being challenged by a growing number of processors who see those leftover streams as raw material for entirely new products, from skincare ingredients to plastic alternatives.
The economic logic behind this shift, often called the circular bioeconomy, is straightforward. Instead of treating a harvest as a single output, a biomass stream gets separated into several usable components, each sold into whichever market values it most. A hemp harvest for grain, for example, can yield seed for food and oil. Chaff (the plant husk) is left in the field with the straw (the stalk). With decortication the straw will yield fiber for clothing and construction, and hurd for animal litter or construction materials while residues are simply discarded or pelletized for energy use. Micronization (the process of reducing the average diameter of solid material particles down to the micrometer or nanometer range) will convert chaff and residues into commercial powders. When a processor can capture value from more than one of those streams, the economics of growing the crop improve for everyone upstream, and less material ends up unused.
Québec’s provincial government has been putting real money behind this idea. The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food’s new biofood policy, covering 2025 through 2035, allocates approximately $745.5 million (CAD $1.05 billion) over its first five years, with part of that funding earmarked for projects that make better use of the province’s agricultural land and biomass. The Canadian Federal Government has added to that with a separate commitment of roughly $24.1 million (CAD $34 million) toward modernizing food processing in the province, spread across more than fifty businesses and organizations.
One region benefiting from this push is Saguenay Lac Saint Jean, a few hours north of Québec City, home to one of Canada’s largest concentrations of organic grain hemp. Regional producers cultivate close to 3,000 acres (1,200 hectares) of hemp a year across sixteen farms, according to local business reporting, with Ferme Tournevent in Hébertville acting as the anchor grower. Tournevent has farmed organically since 2008 and now operates an oil extraction plant processing organic hemp, and other organic oil-bearing crops, supplying hemp oil and protein to buyers in the food and cosmetics industries. The Lac St-Jean region accounts for more than one quarter of Canada’s organic hemp production.
The same region also has a head start in organic oats. Ferme Olofée, based in Saint Félicien, is widely regarded as Québec’s largest organic oat producer and processor, with annual sales in the range of $6.4 million (CAD $9 million), and it grows and mills its own grain rather than relying on outside suppliers. Cuisine Soleil, located nearby in La Doré, processes organic gluten free oat flour for other manufacturers. Together, these operations give the region something unusual, two organic crops, hemp and oats, being grown and partially processed within a short radius of each other, which matters to buyers who increasingly want to know exactly where an ingredient came from.
This regional density is exactly what La Chanvrière du Lac, known as LCL, is built to take advantage of. LCL headed up by Paul Perrault, Ph.D. is looking to develop Québec’s first industrial platform dedicated to producing high value biosourced powders from organic hemp, organic oats, and other agricultural biomass grown in the region. Rather than sourcing raw material from distant suppliers, LCL draws on the concentration of organic hemp already grown around it and works directly with regional organic oat processors, giving it a supply chain that is both short and traceable from field to finished powder. That structure matters to buyers in cosmetics, personal care, and materials manufacturing, industries where the origin and consistency of an ingredient increasingly factors into purchasing decisions.
“One of the most promising developments in the bioeconomy is the growing recognition that agricultural co-products can become valuable industrial ingredients rather than low-value residues”, Paul Perrault, President of LCL.
Building a platform on that foundation still takes real engineering and commercial work. Processing agricultural byproducts into ingredient grade powder involves real technical hurdles around consistency, particle size, and food or cosmetic safety standards, and building buyer relationships in industries like cosmetics takes years, not months. The existing base of organic growers in Lac Saint Jean give LCL a starting position that few processors elsewhere in Canada could replicate, which is precisely why the region was chosen as the site for this kind of platform in the first place.
The next article in this series turns to the other side of that equation, the cosmetics, personal care, and materials companies actually buying plant-based powders, and what the market data behind that demand suggests about where this sector is headed.
