Joe and Pauline St. Denis: Health and Wellness

As you may know, many people are allergic to peanuts or other nuts, a fact that can make life difficult given the large number of foods that contain nuts. In the small town of Legal, Alberta, a new bread spread was born through innovation that contains no nuts.

The people responsible for the NoNuts Golden Peabutter are Joe and Pauline St. Denis. For 3 years they developed the product in their farmhouse and at the Leduc Food Processing Development Centre. In 2002 Joe began marketing NoNuts Golden Peabutter, made from the dry brown peas he has grown in his fields for 20 years.

After growing and exporting brown, green and yellow peas and faba beans to markets as distant as India, South Africa, China and several Middle East countries, St. Denis and his wife Pauline decided to try marketing a different type of seed to new and existing buyers.

Joe and Pauline were experts regarding the common usage of beans and peas in the nation’s kitchens, so they considered other products that had never been distributed in Alberta, let alone Canada.  The first of these products was the peanut butter. They used a brown field pea to which they own the North America breeding rights, and produced it through Mountain Meadows Food Processing Ltd. in the town of Legal.

You might be thinking there is no substitute for peanut butter, but according to Joe "It tastes, looks and smells almost identical to peanut butter."  Joe goes on to say, "We now are in every major grocery chain across Canada. We are in 3,000 stores."

The success of NoNuts Golden Peabutter has Joe and Pauline looking to create new pea or bean-related foods. A snack similar to Cheezies, only made with brown pea flour, is on the drawing board with a producer in China. So too is a falafel mix that uses peas and faba beans rather than the more traditional chickpeas. A 23-percent protein popcorn snack made of peas is also in development, as is pea flour for baking low-carbohydrate bread.

For more information on NoNuts Golden Peabutter please click the following link.