Add an onion the easy way

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

No more cryin’ in the kitchen.

An innovative new product from Sheffield Mills farm Nova Agri aims to solve a number of problems.

First, preparing onions makes many people teary-eyed. “Some people just hate cutting up onions,” says Nancy Tregunno, Nova Agri’s new product developer. “The deal is, we’re hitting people who want to cook something homemade, but don’t have time to make totally from-scratch meals.”

The answer to cooks’ needs: diced onions in a dish: “This is just one less thing for people to do.”

Tregunno says, for the farm, the fresh-cut onions could also be part of the answer to close to two million pounds of non-standard onions sorted from close to 20 million pounds of onions packed every year by the operation.

It’s also adding a value-added product to traditional farming. Think baby cut carrots or bagged salads. “None of this existed five years ago, but it’s a necessity now,” Tregunno says. “Farming is not very lucrative and, if you want to stay alive, you have to be creative.”

Nova Agri found American farms making fresh-cut onions and watched the process. In the summer of 2006, it launched its own fresh-cut product through Sobeys’ outlets. “We had way too many, but they did move.”

This past summer, Loblaws also took on the product, along with a few food services companies, restaurants and institutions; Tregunno says it seems to be moving. “So far, so good.”

It’s not just a matter of dicing onions, though. Nova Agri spent a great deal of time looking at which varieties would work best, processing practices to keep diced onions longer, fitting the product into its on-farm food safety routines and packaging.

Here, Nova Agri found a green option: the dish and lid looks like plastic, but it’s compostable PLA - made from the sugars in field corn. “You throw it in your backyard composter and it’s gone in 90 days under the right conditions.”

Tregunno says Nova Agri and other manufacturers are working with the province’s waste managers to find ways to handle PLA packaging in regular pick-ups.

In the meantime, Nova Agri is dicing onions three days a week. Workers trim and peel the onions - “Your eyes adjust, and we have fresh air coming in,” Tregunno says; they’re dipped in a food-grade sanitizer and then mechanically diced by three-way blades that could do 20,000 pounds of onions an hour. “We’re holding our own: for the customers, they’re great. The bottom line for farmers is key.”