Dealers Ingredients – October 2018, Food in Canada

By Treena Hein

Brampton, Ont.-based Dealers Ingredients has proudly provided innovative, healthy ingredient solutions to the Canadian food industry since 1976.
“We originally started as a distributor of dairy products and while dairy remains an important part of the business,” said president and chief executive officer Chuck Harvey, “our firm has gone through many changes to ensure it kept up with trends related to changing customer demands.”
Reflecting its origins, the company was originally called Dealers Dairy Canada Ltd., and through the mid 1980s, Alex Robinson (who passed away suddenly earlier this year) was instrumental in helping the team expand distribution of dairy products across Canada. “In the mid 1990s, we became the exclusive Canadian distributor of Butter Buds, a line of functional dairy concentrates and a natural flavour alternative,” Harvey said. “This began expansion of our portfolio of functional, healthy ingredients which strongly complemented our growing dairy products business.”
Shortly thereafter, the firm changed its name to Dealers Ingredients to recognize the company’s new focus on branded ingredients. This position was further solidified in 2013, when faced with a marketplace determined to reduce salt content in food, Dealers Ingredients acquired the distribution rights for OneGrain, a unique salt reduction solution from AkzoNobel of the Netherlands.
Under Harvey’s leadership over the past nine years, there have been significant changes in the way that Dealers Ingredients conducts business. “First came the construction of a test kitchen facility and presentation room at our head office, which enhanced our capacity to create and consult on product development concepts and allowed us to conduct customized customer presentations,” said Harvey. “The next significant step for the firm came when we began to develop and distribute our own products across North America. This era was ushered in with the introduction of the award-winning Profi line of products.”
Profi Pro is a complete high-protein plant-based composite (Profi Bake is the same composite with added dietary fibre, specially designed to manage water in baked goods). These products were so successful that Dealers Ingredients created an affiliate company called Profi Pro Inc., which deliverers great tasting, plant-based protein products directly to Canadian consumers.
As the market continued to shift towards cleaner and healthier sources of protein, Dealers Ingredients followed with single-source plant proteins under its own brand, Natralein, in 2016 (Natralein Pea and Natralein Brown Rice). In 2017, Dealers Ingredients was recognized for its contributions to the health of Canadians by receiving GHP’s ‘Canada’s Top 10 Best Contributions to Healthcare and Pharma’ award.
This year, the company partnered with the Stern-Wywiol Group to bring Hydrosol food stabilizer to Canada. “As a fast-growing international supplier of customized food stabilizers and texturing systems for over 30 years, Hydrosol is best known for simplifying complex product challenges within both traditional and vegan dairy, meat and sauce categories,” Harvey said. “These products will help Canadian manufacturers capitalize on the trend of clean, product labels and the growing market of plant-based diets.
“We are well-known experts within the key categories of plant-based proteins, natural dairy flavour ingredients and added-value commodity dairy products,” said Harvey. “The expansion into new categories such as stabilizers and texturing solutions for both traditional and vegan dairy, meat and sauce options will only further solidify our reputation for bringing powerful, natural food ingredients that will positively impact the healthy lifestyle choices of Canadians for many years to come.”