Pork processing plant being converted to turkey

Friday, March 27, 2015

by BETTER FARMING STAFF

Any lingering hopes pork producers might have had that the Great Lakes Specialty Meats plant at Mitchell would reopen and process hogs were dashed Thursday.

Markham based, privately-held, Sofina Foods Inc. announced it will “transition” the previous pork producing facility into a turkey processing operation.

Sofina, which owns Ontario’s largest pork processing plant in Burlington, purchased the shuttered Mitchell plant in September. Great Lakes Specialty Meats Inc. of Canada closed its doors in late May, taken down in the wake of the financial failure of Quality Meat Packers and an associated company in Toronto. All were owned by the Schwartz family.

When Sofina first purchased the shuttered Mitchell plant, it temporarily raised hopes that it would be brought back into pork production, although there were privately voiced concerns that it was too small to be competitive. On Wednesday, Ontario Pork chair Amy Cronin allowed that it was unlikely to reopen to process pork.

The Mitchell plant, known then as West Perth, had been built by Miriam Terpstra of Brussels and run jointly with Larry and Glenn Tulpin of St. Williams in 2002, killing mostly pigs raised by the Terpstra family’s operations.  Acre-T Farms, with 15,000 sows, was one of the largest hog producers in Ontario at the time.

The pork industry’s loss is turkey’s gain. Sofina’s announcement describes the Mitchell plant as “the single largest investment in the Canadian turkey industry in over 25 years” and compliments a plant in nearby Dublin.

There are roughly 200 turkey producers in the province producing more than 75 million kg of basic quota. There was no one available in the turkey board office in Kitchener to comment and a message left with the board’s answering service was not returned.  The board’s annual meeting is being held on Friday. BF