After years of tinkering in the kitchen, Sturgeon County legume producer Joe St. Denis has cooked up a nutritious peanut butter substitute that spreads like a dream and tastes EXACTLY like the original. But it’s made from peas.

Joe and his wife, Pauline, are marketing the delectable spread as NoNuts Golden Pea Butter (though Business Edge office wits insist the couple should have gone with Pea NOT Butter).

But what’s in a name? More than 4,000 supportive e-mails have poured into St. Denis Seed Farms since September, and the authors unanimously agree – the non-allergenic product is a godsend.

“How do I say thank you to someone who has changed my family’s life?” wrote one of the couple’s peanut-sensitive neighbours in Legal, about 30 minutes north of downtown Edmonton.

It’s human nature. You’ll never know how much you crave the taste until an allergist breaks the news that you can never savour it again. Apparently, there are a lot of frustrated peanut-butter freaks out there.

Larry MacDougal, Business Edge
Joe St. Denis has invented allergy-free golden pea butter.

Another Pea Butter convert, who said he reacts violently from even a whiff of peanut butter, testified that he raced through the local IGA checkout, then sampled the nut-free substitute in the parking lot.

“It was wonderful . . . brought tears to my eyes,” he swooned.

According to the provincial Agriculture and Food Council, as many as four million North Americans suffer serious, often deadly, allergic reactions from peanuts.

Canadian distributors based in Victoria, Vancouver and Edmonton have been quick to pick up on rising interest in the new product, prepared from red peas, canola oil, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and sugar.

As recently as last week, good news for St. Denis was breaking on twin fronts.

On Tuesday, the farm’s NoNuts manufacturing wing, known as Mountain Meadows Food Processing Ltd., signed a deal with Puresource Inc. of Guelph, Ont. A national distributor of health foods, Puresource is poised to make NoNuts available to large and small retailers throughout Central and Eastern Canada.

Then last Friday, the Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors gave the company a Grand Prix Award for innovation during a western regional conference at Calgary’s Coast Plaza Hotel.

Of course, St. Denis was pleased. Still, he seemed to think it was high time the humble pea received its due. “Everything about peas is good,” he said. “More people should eat them.”

He speaks authoritatively about legumes, proteins, celiac disease (“our product is gluten-free”) and NoNuts’ Golden Pea Butter’s low glycemic index, which makes it ideal fare for diabetics.

But 20 years ago, St. Denis was an Otis Elevators mechanic, based in Edmonton and yearning to get back to country roots.

That’s about the time he and Pauline turned their backs on the city. They acquired the Legal property with an eye to growing grain. Flat North American markets subsequently convinced them to switch to an alternative crop. They’ve prospered with peas ever since.

St. Denis ships green and yellow peas and fava beans to South America, India and China, where legume-based snack foods are a staple. Joe’s initial plan was to create a pea-based hummus substitute.

“But hummus is made from chick peas and we can’t grow chick peas up here,” he said. “Don’t have the heat units.”

So the hummus hunt was scratched and the quest for a zero-cholesterol, high-protein peanut butter hit its stride.

Joe took his findings to the Leduc Food Processing Development Centre, where researchers helped him develop an early prototype.

And while he’s grateful for the assistance (plus a $9,000 boost from the National Research Council), virtually all production and development costs – an estimated $600,000 – have been shouldered by St. Denis Seed Farm/Mountain Meadows.

St. Denis scavenged North America to find processing equipment, then built a 6,000-sq.-ft. pilot plant to manufacture his spread.

St. Denis Seed Farms has already de-stoned, de-hulled, cleaned and dried enough red peas to fill thousands more jars of NoNuts Golden Pea Butter.

Many were harvested three or four years ago, well before chronic drought conditions settled into the region.

“That’s another good thing about peas,” enthused the evangelistic pea-picker from Legal. “You can store ’em indefinitely. Peanuts go rancid.”

Bringing the NoNuts spread to market has been a costly exercise, but the positive customer/retailer feedback has been heartening. St. Denis feels vindicated every time he gets another laudatory e-mail that says: Bless your pea-pickin’ heart.