Overview
Canada’s dairy industry faces a significant challenge ensuring the microbial safety and quality of dairy powders used in high-value products. Current lab-based microbial testing methods are too slow, often taking days to yield results, which delays critical quality control decisions and contributes to waste, recalls, and lost revenue.
With the Canadian milk powder market valued at approximately $8.4 billion and losses from poor quality ranging from 2 to 10 percent annually, the opportunity for a faster, on-site solution is clear. To address this, Gay Lea Foods, in collaboration with the University of Guelph, Dairy Farmers of Ontario, and technology partners including Oxford Nanopore and NEB, will develop and deploy the Nanopore-Optimized Mobile Analysis for Diversity (NOMAD) system.
NOMAD is a portable, genomics-based platform that uses full-length 16S rRNA gene sequencing on the Oxford Nanopore MinION device to deliver same-day, species-level microbial detection. This project will validate NOMAD for routine quality control, target a sample-to-result turnaround time of under 10 hours, and benchmark its performance against traditional lab testing.
Field-ready protocols for DNA extraction, PCR, and sequencing, paired with a cloud-based taxonomy pipeline and intuitive dashboard, will enable real-time decision-making at the production site. The path to commercialization includes launching a dedicated service company to offer NOMAD as a mobile microbiome testing platform, starting with Gay Lea’s network of 1,300 producers and expanding to other dairy processors and adjacent sectors such as brewing.
Services will be offered through a subscription or per-test pricing model, with tiered offerings for routine surveillance, hygiene validation, and on-demand testing. The expected benefits to Canada include job creation, increased molecular diagnostic capacity, reduced waste, improved product safety, and enhanced competitiveness of the Canadian agri-food sector. With strong alignment between the receptor, academic researchers, and technology providers, this project is designed to deliver meaningful, scalable impact across Canada’s dairy industry and beyond.