Southwestern Ontario pork processor Great Lakes Specialty Meats of Canada has picked up a $4.5 million federal loan toward planned expansion.
The company, based at Mitchell, about 60 km north of London, plans to put the funding from the federal Slaughter Improvement Program toward improved capabilities to make value-added products, using equipment and technology such as traceability systems for food safety.
“This will create more jobs in the Mitchell area and keep hog processing in southern Ontario,” the federal government said in a release Saturday.
Local MP Gary Schellenberger said in the same release that local farmers “will benefit from expanded markets” and “investing in a stronger meat packing and processing sector in Canada benefits the entire value chain.”
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Great Lakes Specialty Meats, which employs about 80 people and processes about 5,000 hogs per week, has been an arm of Toronto-based Quality Meat Packers, the province’s second-largest hog processor, since last fall.
“This loan is very important because it will allow us to take this facility from a processor of mainly lower-value commodity pork products to one that is efficient, modern and capable of producing higher-value-added products for domestic and international markets,” company president David Schwartz said in a separate release.
Conditions of the loan and details about the specific improvements at the Mitchell plant haven’t yet been finalized, the company said.
“I anticipate that we will be able to begin the upgrades sometime this summer and they will be completed in 2012,” Schwartz said in the company’s release.
To be eligible for Slaughter Improvement Program funds, a project’s activities and costs must have been incurred no earlier than April 1, 2009. Funded projects must be finished by March 31, 2012.
Originally budgeted to provide up to $50 million in loans, the federal program is meant to back “sound business plans aimed at reducing costs, increasing revenues and improving operations” for Canadian red meat packers and processors.
The federal budget in March put up an additional $10 million for the program from the federal Agricultural Flexibility Fund.
