More than a year after the ground breaking was held on Roquette’s pea-processing plant at Portage la Prairie, Man., construction resumed on it at the end of October.
According to a company spokesperson, construction was halted last spring “to adjust and fine tune the project.”
”We took the opportunity to include some upgrades to allow us to include a broader range of pea protein products to better serve the continuously growing market demand,” James Bozikis, Roquette’s head of communications and public affairs for the Americas, said in an email.
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Bozikis said the company wants to provide a broader range of products to meet more applications.
“You only get the chance to build once — we wanted to ensure we had included all we could into the plans before we started building in earnest.”
The $400 million pea-processing plant was originally announced in January 2017 and the French company broke ground on the project in September 2017. Originally it was to be operational by April 2019, which was later changed to mid-2019 and then 2020.
Bozikis confirmed the plant is now to be operational during the second half of 2020.
Once in full production, the plant is expected to process 120,000 tonnes of peas annually.
According to Statistics Canada, 3.6 million acres of peas were seeded in Canada this year. Of those, 85,000 acres were in Manitoba and 1.9 million acres in Saskatchewan.
“While we may process peas from other provinces, Portage offers an ideal business environment to accelerate our development and contribute to further developing pea production in Manitoba,” Bozikis said.
