Patience and determination needed | Glitches in renovating and licensing the facility have almost been worked out
VALLEYVIEW, Alta. — Red tape, rules and regulations haven’t made it easy for a new rabbit processing plant to open its doors.
Marion Popkin bought a provincially inspected slaughter plant built inside a shipping container from Rouleau, Sask., 18 months ago. However, floods and road bans prevented her from moving the plant to Alberta until fall.
Freeze up in Popkin’s hometown of Valleyview in northern Alberta prevented the construction of additional infrastructure.
As well, rules and regulations for rabbit slaughter needed to be written, and a Swiss butcher with his own ideas about how the plant should be designed created additional delays.
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“We had no idea it would take this long,” Popkin said inside the mostly completed rabbit processing plant.
She hopes the plant will be open before the end of September.
Popkin said the knowledge she has gained during this process can be used for a blueprint for other rabbit processing plants.
“As the industry grows, it’s possible to replicate this plant in different places,” she said.
Popkin said she has received hundreds of calls from interested people across the Prairies who want to raise rabbits. Until the processing plant is operating, she encourages potential rabbit producers to wait.
“We have a whole list of people who want to raise rabbit and a bunch ready to buy them, we just have a little detail in the middle,” she said.
The list of details for the processing plant is long. A concrete pad needed engineered drawings, the packaging room, processing room and cooler needed to meet provincial standards, regulations needed to be rewritten for rabbits rather than cattle and changes need to be made to meet the standards of Hans Neukom, the new Swiss butcher.
Neukom insisted the existing processing equipment be removed and additional features added to make the processing plant more efficient.
“We had to redo it a little bit to make it suitable for the kind of work we do here,” said Neukom.
In Switzerland, it’s common to process rabbits at small plants. A license isn’t needed if fewer than 1,000 rabbits are butchered a year.
Until all the glitches are worked out of the processing plant, rabbits will be slaughtered at existing slaughter plants and trucked to the processing plant in Valleyview in refrigerated trucks and then shipped to stores and restaurants.
Popkin said the 18 months of work has made her more committed to making the project successful.
“We can relate why other plants didn’t make it. You’ve got to do the whole, ‘I believe in it’ thing. The process of trying to get it going is a real market barrier to entry. I think the most important thing is patience.”
