Farmscape for April 14, 2021

A new report from Farm Credit Canada indicates the Canadian food and beverage sector is well positioned to take advantage of the new marketing opportunities that will be created as the global economy opens back up.
A just released Farm Credit Canada report shows, while the global pandemic has resulted in losses, it's also created new opportunities for Canada's food and beverage sector.
FCC Principal Economist Craig Klemmer says 2020 was a roller coaster year with the pandemic disrupting supply chains and export markets and prompting the closure of food service but the food and beverage sector has adapted.

Clip-Craig Klemmer-Farm Credit Canada:
The industry has done an extremely good job of adjusting to all of these challenges, changing some of their tactics, remaining quite agile and resilient and that's allowed the industry to weather this pandemic better than other parts of the Canadian economy.
We're seeing a number of operations and processors direct marketing to consumers, so a different and improved online presence and that's getting greater access to customers that maybe they hadn't had before.
Being agile in terms of creating those distribution lines and packaging to make sure that some of the product that was destined for the food services industry is shifted to the grocery industry and adjusting to where the consumers are purchasing.
That agility and those relationships and that customer service that's being provided there is really well positioning the food companies to adjust to that.
I think that the industry is well fairly well positioned all in all.
There still remains challenges, still remains some uncertainty in terms of how do we find that balance with the reopening of food services through 2021 but overall Canadian food manufacturing companies are in a good position to take advantage not only of the domestic market but the export market as well.

Klemmer acknowledges, while food manufacturing sales did decline last year, we're expecting a rebound in 2021 as economies slowly open up.
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Bruce Cochrane.

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