Leading Flaxseed Suppliers: Part 1

Here we start with brief reviews of the leading flaxseed suppliers on our initial list. The goal is to look at them all briefly and identify which ones to put on a short list for more in-depth reviews.

Agricore United

Agricore United was formed in 2001 as a merger of Agricore and United Grain Growers. It is now the largest grain company in Canada. It is a public company based in Winnipeg and trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol AU-LV. They deal with a lot more than flaxseeds. Their sales include crop inputs and services, grain merchandising, livestock production services and financial markets. Their annual sales are about $350 million Canadian dollars. Someone over at Agricore should really do something about their outdated website.

Alfred C. Toepfer (Canada) Ltd.

Alfred C. Toepfer is a German company based out of Hamburg. They trade in grain, oilseeds and feedstuffs and have about 1,600 employees. If their website is any indication of their marketing prowess, they are doing well.

Argosy International Inc

Argosy is based out of New York and looks to be a private company. Their main products are specialty chemicals and tapes including tooling resins, adhesives, coatings, potting compounds, specialty tapes, film adhesives, honeycomb, sealants and prepregs. Their website is at ArgosyChemical. This market is not of much interest for our purposes.

Bioriginal Food & Science Corp.

This is the first company on our alphabetical list that looks very promising for our purposes here.

Bioriginal is a privately owned company founded in 1986. It's based out of Saskatoon, Canada. They see themselves primarily as "a global provider of innovative essential fatty acid (EFA) solutions". Their products are used in nutraceuticals, functional foods, skin care products, cosmetics, animal feed, veterinary products and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals.

According to their web site Bioriginal "provides EFAs including flax, evening primrose, borage (starflower), black currant, fish, hemp, echium, perilla and camelina as well as CLA. Delivery systems range from bulk oil and capsules, to finished, packaged products. In addition to the standard oil or seed formats, Bioriginal provides custom formulations, highly-concentrated EFA oils, water-soluble EFA powders, and a line of flax-based low net carb functional food products including BakOmega®, FibrOmega® and ProBioFlax™."

Their goal is to be the global leader in EFA-based solutions to the nutritional supplement industry. We'll definitely want to investigate this company in detail in a future post.


This completes Part 1 of a brief overview of the first few flaxseed suppliers on our list. To be continued in Part 2.

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The above image is "Peppers & Oil II" by Tanya Fischer