Maple Leaf has a new recipe for survival.
By 2014, the company will run Canada’s largest bakery and wiener factory virtually side-by-side in Hamilton’s Red Hill Business Park South. Combined, that’s almost 800,000 square feet devoted to hotdog fixings, not to mention 400 other types of processed meat.
The massive “protein industry” consolidation will see Maple Leaf shed 1,500 jobs and shutter six smaller meat processing plants across Canada in its struggle to compete with larger players in the United States that have taken a big bite out of the food company’s profits in recent years, executive vice-president Rick Young said Thursday.
“It’s a matter of survival,’ he said. “We need to aggregate our volume for reasons of scale. Without that scale, we can’t afford … to invest in the new technology we need to compete.”
Industry watchers appear to agree. Bob Seguin, who heads Guelph’s George Morris Centre, a national agri-food think-tank, said competitors will be watching closely.
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