Hogs will start flowing through Maple Leaf Pork’s processing plant in Brandon, Man., within days.
On Aug. 20 the province approved licences needed for the company, Canada’s largest food processor, to start ramping up its $120 million plant.
Maple Leaf Pork president Pat Jones said slaughter at the plant will begin Aug. 30.
The first week will serve as a test kill, a chance to tune up the flow of carcasses as they wind their way through the plant, which is the size of 11 football fields.
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The plant is expected to reach its one-shift capacity of 45,000 hogs a week as early as next March, Jones said. That capacity will be doubled when the plant adds a second shift, which could happen within the next five years.
Michael McCain, Maple Leaf Foods president and chief executive officer, described the Brandon processing plant as his company’s crown jewel.
“I believe it will be the best, most efficient hog processing plant in the world.”
Hogs for the plant will be sourced from Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.
McCain said he hopes a protocol will be in place this fall allowing hogs from American farms certified as pseudorabies free to be imported into Canada for slaughter. But he offered no hint whether Maple Leaf Pork will buy a lot of U.S. hogs once that protocol is in place.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” he said Aug. 20 while addressing a group of reporters in Winnipeg.
The Brandon plant leaves Maple Leaf better poised to compete in Canada and on the global front. The plant has also become a lynchpin in efforts to expand Manitoba’s hog industry.
That expansion has been slowed by poor prices paid for hogs.
But the president of Elite Swine, a hog production management company headquartered in Manitoba, said he is confident of the industry’s future. Dickson Gould said sluggish prices have not generated an exodus of people from the hog industry.
“People are not talking about pulling out, but perhaps holding off on expansion,” he said last week.
