Deep down, who isn’t convinced that the food we eat – the burgers we grill and the eggs we fry – isn’t contaminated with … something we’re probably happier not really knowing about?
Well, it’s Olga Pawluczyk’s job to know about it. And she says that the food supply is essentially safe. And the companies entrusted with making it so? They’re doing a very good job.
“The food plants in Canada, the ones in Ontario and Manitoba that I’ve seen, are spectacular,” says Pawluczyk, the CEO of P&P Optica. “They are so clean, and so safe. So many people are paying so much attention to make sure your food is safe and healthy, that it’s actually surprising.”
P&P Optica is a Waterloo-based company that makes scanning technology capable of chemically analyzing food as it’s rolling down the production line. That piece of plastic embedded in a sirloin steak? Her firm’s equipment will find it before it gets to a consumer’s table. Those burgers that McDonald’s produces? One hundred per cent beef, she says.
“I’ve seen this stuff that’s being made. [The people making our food are] passionate about their jobs. They feed you the ingredients they’re supposed to feed you.”
The company’s equipment is just now being rolled out with food producers, but reaching this stage was a long road. The firm got its start some 18 years ago and has gone through many iterations, landing on food inspection as its core activity only a few years ago, just as oil prices began to fall and the Western Canadian bitumen industry began to falter. Oil analysis was previously P&P Optica’s target use case.
“We went from oil and gas to the food industry in a matter of four weeks,” she says.
Today, P&P Optica has 25 employees, is aiming for 30 within the next few months, and is on track to shortly close a Series A fundraising round.
Speaking to an audience at Communitech Tuesday at an event known as “Pizza with the Prez,” an ongoing series of lunchtime chats with leaders from the Toronto-Waterloo tech corridor, Pawluczyk says entrepreneurs have to be prepared for the long haul.
“Even if you look historically, everybody starts small and fails multiple times before they make it big. Some people are lucky, but you also create your own luck. You have to work very, very hard.”
As for things she has learned since pivoting to a focus on food safety, the issue that concerns Pawluczyk most about our food supply isn’t contamination, but consumer choice.
Consumers, she says, are attracted to food that looks pretty. As a result, producers engineer food to look good and withstand long rides on trucks, but at the expense of taste and nutritional value. Take tomatoes, for example.
“[They’re] round and shapely and ... they can last in transport forever,” she says. “And they’re also pink and taste like crap.”
But that issue aside, the farms and plants that she has visited in Canada have largely impressed her.
“Farmers care about their fields, about the planet for their kids, about the water supply,” Pawluczyk says. “I was once at an egg farm, and saw how much they worry about their chickens.
“There is a level of care.”
That said, she draws a line of caution at one particular food. Hot dogs, she explains, are emulsified, making it virtually impossible to discover if a contaminant has found its way into the manufacturing process.
“Let’s say there’s there’s [a piece of] plastic in the hot dog,” Pawluczyk says. “By the time it’s cooked and emulsified, it kind of disappears.
“So I stay away from hot dogs.
“But,” she says, “I still eat bacon. I still eat sausages.”
