Canada’s Ventures to Value Chains: Ag-Bioeconomy is part of a Foresight initiative leveraging data from technology companies and other key stakeholders to map, categorize, and analyze strategically important industry value chains for Canada in the clean economy.
Challenges and Opportunities in Canada's Ag-Bioeconomy
The agricultural bioeconomy (ag-bioeconomy) value chain illustrates the process of converting agricultural biomass (e.g., crops, plant residues, and animal waste) into a diverse range of products such as fuels, chemicals, consumer products, and food additives. By transforming agricultural byproducts into renewable, bio-based materials, the ag-bioeconomy inherently creates a cyclical and resource-efficient system.
Canada has more biomass per capita than any other country on Earth, and there are growing opportunities to leverage this in the country’s transition to a more sustainable, cost-efficient, and resilient economy. Canada's agriculture sector, in particular, currently holds numerous untapped bioeconomy opportunities.
Mapping technology innovators in the ag-bioeconomy sector can help to inform strategies to leverage growth opportunities by highlighting where Canadian companies are driving progress. With Foresight’s proprietary data on Canada’s ag-bioeconomy technology companies, this edition of our Ventures to Value Chains (V2VC) initiative aims to provide our Helix-5™ partners with key insights on Canada’s areas of strength and opportunities for growth.
This report is available for download. Submit this form for access.
The Value Chain
The ag-bioeconomy technology value chain builds on Foresight’s previously mapped agri-food value chain, outlining a series of processing steps from non-food products and compost. Divided into 5 main categories of end-use applications, the value chain steps mapped in the dataset cover technologies in the ag-bioeconomy that collect and convert the byproducts of the agri-food sector into various bio-based products. This value chain is intended to represent the waste diversion opportunities in the agriculture sector, aligned with ongoing sustainable innovation across diverse sectors.
Canada’s Ag-Bioeconomy Companies
19 companies are assigned to Canada’s ag-bioeconomy value chain.
- The value chain step with the highest number of companies assigned is biofuels & energy (34).
- The value chain steps least represented are bioplastics & packaging (15) and bio-based chemicals & materials (18)
Our data and analysis indicate and discuss trends, clustering, areas of strength, and potential opportunities for growth. Some of the key takeaways include:
- Quebec has the highest proportion of biofuel & energy companies of all provinces.
- Only 17% of the companies are located in Canada’s three largest census metropolitan areas (CMAs): Vancouver (7), Toronto (11), and Montreal (2).
- 20% of mapped companies in BC are connected to aquaculture through algae, seaweed, and other marine biotechnology components.
- The most represented VC steps in Ontario are biomass feedstocks & waste valorization (11), and biofuels & energy (10).
- Around one-third of companies in Alberta focus on or include hemp-based innovations.
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Why is this important?
Foresight’s venture acceleration programming emphasizes the importance of understanding your value chain. Knowing where a company fits along the value chain, which companies or technologies come before or after, who the competitors are, and where trends are happening geographically is critical information for ventures, industry, and investors to understand.
This information is also highly important for governments to identify areas of strength, gaps, and opportunities in the innovation landscape, pinpoint areas for targeted support, and identify where targeted R&D and project funding will deliver the greatest return on investment for Canada’s communities and environment.
The Canada’s Ventures to Value Chains: Ag-Bioeconomy web map and analysis report are invaluable tools intended to provide the Helix-5™ ecosystem with unique insights into the landscape of Canadian innovation in this space.
Interested in learning more about Canada’s ag-bioeconomy value chain? Download the full report below.
