“If you haven’t tried Shelly’s 4X bread, are you really enjoying that sandwich?” In all honesty, the ship has long since sailed for that bread-tasting opportunity. But if you were around Western Canada in the first half of the 20th century, you might be quite familiar with the compelling billboards, illustrated with cartoon characters. They appeared across the West, promoting the quality of the Vancouver-based bread maker’s high-quality 4X bakery products. On some signs, it was recommended to eat two slices at every meal.

Chefs are today’s rock stars and providing them with innovative educational opportunities allows them to be ambassadors for many tantalizing foods, including pulses—the official term for beans, peas, lentils and chickpeas.

Farming isn’t rocket science. It’s actually more complicated than that. The high-tech equipment and production practices employed by farmers today raise the bar on efficiency, environmental sustainability and, ultimately, food quality and safety. Reducing costs and improving productivity is a common theme with new technologies. Here is a quick summary of a few of the technologies at play on Canadian farms.

It is difficult to imagine a time when coffee wasn’t everywhere, but hundreds of years ago Italian peasants—unable to afford what was then a premium product—refined the art of recreating the satisfying coffee flavour with novel ingredients. Barley coffee, or caffe d’orzo (orzo means barley in Italian), emerged from this tradition and the beverage enjoyed a surge in popularity when wartime made coffee scarce in parts of Europe. Now, in the age of coffee ubiquity, a few small companies are bringing caffe d’orzo to the world.