There’s a lot of excitement across the prairies around the Protein Supercluster Initiative announced late last week.

The Protein Innovations Supercluster is one of five technology groups that will share up to 950-million dollars in the federal government's superclusters initiative.

Frank Hart is the Board Chair for Protein Industries Canada, the new Protein innovation supercluster.

"Western Canada produces a lot of protein locked in the crops that are grown here. Whether its cereals, pulse crops, such as lentils, peas, chickpeas, etc., or canola," he said. "But a lot of that product is shipped in the community from outside of Canada, some of its crushed in the canola industry, but a lot of it, is sent out as a raw product and this is a really interesting opportunity to develop a lot of value added around those crops."

He says they’re looking at pulling plant proteins out and selling them into the food ingredients business and helping grow agri-food business here at home.

He says their overall mission is to move Canada into second place in the world in terms of agricultural exports, and fifth in the world in terms of agri-food and have Canada seen as a global leader in clean, safe, trusted food.