Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada / Hedley Technologies Inc.

FPTT Technology Transfer Award

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada /
Hedley Technologies Inc.

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Successful development of an improved diatomaceous earth-based insecticide used by the stored grain and food processing industry

Paul Fields
Cereal Research Centre, AAFC

John Leyshon
Cereal Research Centre, AAFC

Zlatko Korunic
Hedley Technologies Inc.

Peter Ormesher
Hedley Technologies Inc

Before it linked up with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) in 1993, Hedley Technologies Inc. was a small Mississauga venture development company of three employees struggling to pitch a good product to the wrong market. With annual losses of approximately $800,000, the owners realized that the retail home-and-garden trade was too soft a target for the company's initial product, Insecolo, a diatomaceous earth-based insecticide. Today, Hedley Technologies Inc. is a picture of an FPTT success story: a thriving business with 17 employees, a promising international market, revenues expected to top $2 million in 1998, and a market capitalization of more than $10 million on the Vancouver Stock Exchange. The turnaround happened after Hedley executives approached AAFC with a proposal to collaborate with federal researchers to improve upon their insecticide formula. Working together in government laboratories, the team developed new technology now used in the company's flagship product Protect-It, that cuts by half the application rate needed to kill insects by dehydration. Following AAFC's advice, the company redirected its marketing to the agricultural sector and in particular, the stored grain and food processing industry. "To our mutual benefit, we harvested the intellectual capacity of the government," says Hedley's Chairman and CEO, Peter Ormesher. "Working with the federal government gave us three advantages: a solid knowledge of the problem we were trying to solve; the physical infrastructure of labs and equipment we needed to develop and test our product; and the international respect that federal scientists brought to the table."

Sponsored by:
Perley-Robertson, Panet, Hill & McDougall