Even as a child, Murad Al-Katib could spot an opening in the market.
“My mother always reminds me that I started my first business when I was four years old,” said Al-Katib, President and CEO of AGT Food and Ingredients Inc.
With his allowance, Al-Katib stocked up on Turkish confectionaries while travelling with his family. When he got back to Canada, classmates were eager customers, buying bubblegum and candies Al-Katib sold from his desk.
“I don’t think I ever thought I’d be known in the world as ‘the lentil guy,’ but I think that I’ve always been an entrepreneur,” said Al-Katib.
From bubblegum to kick-starting a multi-billion dollar pulse industry, Al-Katib’s entrepreneurial spirit has served him well. His company, AGT Food and Ingredients, is an international pulse, staple foods and food ingredients supplier based out of Regina, Sask.
With Co-op’s commitment to sourcing healthy products from local producers, and AGT Foods being the high quality pulse producer at home, a partnership was a natural fit. AGT Foods supplies CO-OP GOLD PURE® White Navy Beans, Red Lentils, Laird Lentils, Organic Farro and French Lentils.
A small town start
Growing up in Saskatchewan, agriculture was always part of Al-Katib’s landscape, but pulses were still a niche crop. He started seeing lentils and chickpeas alongside the regular wheat fields in the mid-1980s.
“My father was a doctor in Davidson and one of his patients brought him lentils that were grown in a field right outside of Davidson,” Al-Katib said.
Along with agriculture, connection to community was always strong in the Al-Katib household. In 1976, Al-Katib’s mother was the second woman and first immigrant woman to be elected to a rural municipal council. She eventually became mayor of Davidson.
“I always had a passion for rural and the community and agriculture, and that came from my mother and my father. So when I chose my career, agriculture was something that I went, ‘Wow, there’s just tremendous potential,’” said Al-Katib.
After earning commerce and MBA degrees, he returned to work with the Government of Saskatchewan, but Al-Katib held onto his entrepreneurial aspirations.
While his wife was six months pregnant with twins, Al-Katib quit his job and wrote the business plan for Saskcan Pulse Trading in his basement. It was a risk that paid off.
Taking the agricultural pulse
Al-Katib’s idea was to introduce more Western Canadian farmers to growing pulses in a three-crop rotation, which also included cereals and canola. The advantages were clear: pulses fix nitrogen in soil, they’re an excellent source of protein and they’re drought tolerant.
But more was needed for pulses to take off. “The one thing the farmers wanted was markets,” said Al-Katib. So, Saskcan Pulse Trading created the market by building a red lentil splitting factory, buying the pulses and adding value through processing. That was 2002.
By 2016, Saskcan had become AGT, and was working with farmers on 11 million acres. Now, thanks to Al-Katib and AGT Foods, 60 per cent of the world’s lentils and 65 per cent of the world’s peas come from farmers in Canada.
Hitting the food target
“In the next 40 years, we have to produce as much food as we’ve produced in the last 10,000 years of civilization,” said Al-Katib. With limited land and water resources, high-protein, high-fibre, drought-tolerant pulses will play a huge role.
“It’s an honourable goal and it’s something that I say to our staff and our people: There’s no downside in our business,” said Al-Katib.
But feeding the world starts at home. You can now find locally grown lentils in a number of products at your Co-op, including non-dairy milk produced with yellow peas from an AGT Foods factory, which Al-Katib discovered on a recent trip to a Sherwood Co-op Food Store in Regina.
“Even some of the beans that you find now on the store shelves in the Co-op stores come from our plants,” said Al-Katib.
“It’s pretty cool to see that change that’s happening and be a part of it.”
