Daring to Compete

CHAPTER 4 Entrepreneurs based in the Americas

MURAD AL-KATIB AGT FOOD AND INGREDIENTS INC. EY WORLD ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR 2017 CANADA

Imagine a world without hunger – a world where everyone can eat safe, affordable, and sustainable protein.

That’s the aim of Murad Al-Katib, whose AGT Food and Ingredients Inc. (AGT) – the world’s largest vertically integrated supply chain for lentils, chickpeas, and peas (“pulses”) – is playing its part in growing the world’s plant-based protein supply. “In the next 40 years,” says Murad, “we have to produce as much food as we produced in the past 10,000 years of civilization. That is a great challenge for the world. But in this challenge there is also opportunity.”

Murad was born a first-generation Canadian in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. Even as a five-year-old starting school, Murad’s entrepreneurial spirit was strong. He was more excited by the fact he now had a “store” to sell the bubble gum (sourced from his family’s native Turkey during trips back home to visit relatives) than he was about his education. He also had a gut feeling that there was a big world outside his small town and he had a burning desire to “figure out how to be part of that world.”

Sometime around the age of 12 or 13, Murad realized he would not be following the previous five generations of Al-Katib family men, all of whom had become doctors. Medical school and ...