A major agrifood co-op in Quebec’s Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean region has picked up a federal loan to buy “higher-performance” equipment and boost its efficiency in water use at its dairy.
Nutrinor will get $726,500 in repayable funds from Canada Economic Development’s Business and Regional Growth program for a two-year upgrade project at its Alma, Que. dairy plant.
Part of the project involves “optimizing the dairy’s energy efficiency in order to reduce its consumption of water and cleaning products.”
The improvements and new equipment are expected to create one permanent job and the equivalent of five more over a one-year period, while maintaining almost 130 existing jobs, the government said in a release Friday.
Read Also
Canadian Pork Council meets with U.S. and Mexican counterparts
Leaders of the North American pork sector reaffirmed their commitment to producing nutritious, sustainable and affordable pork at a recent trilateral meeting held in Niagara on the Lake, Ont.
Nutrinor’s dairy products and spring water division, which operates the plant at Alma (about 60 km west of Chicoutimi), is one of the “key links in the co-operative’s chain,” Denis Lebel, the minister of state for Canada Economic Development, said in Friday’s release.
Nutrinor, he noted, processes about 23 million litres of milk a year and transports another 60 million litres for Quebec’s dairy farmer organization, la Federation des producteurs de lait.
Jean-Pierre Blackburn, the MP for Alma and the federal minister of state for agriculture, said the federal government “believes in the importance of supporting this project of the regional flagship Nutrinor, which (overall) employs nearly 400 people, in that it will help the co-operative become more competitive and better hold its own against other Quebec, Canadian and foreign rivals on the market.”
The loan is expected to help St-Bruno-based Nutrinor “enhance its manufacturing processes, productivity and competitiveness at the Alma dairy plant and commercialize its value-added dairy products both within and outside Quebec,” the government said.
The co-op bills its Alma facility as the northernmost dairy in the province, drawing its supplies mostly from farms within 35 km of the plant.
Brands produced at the plant include Nutrinor, Nutrinor Bio, Nutripur and Le Complait, as well as the co-op’s lines of bottled spring water and fruit juices.
