Maple Leaf Foods closed its Marion Street pork processing plant in Winnipeg October 26 as part of plans to centralize primary pork processing at Brandon.

Perry Mohr, the CEO of Manitoba Pork Marketing Co-op Inc., notes his organization was responsible for keeping the Marion Street plant running up to the end so co-op members hogs were the last to be transitioned to Brandon.

Perry Mohr-Manitoba Pork Marketing

Obviously scheduling those animals to get into Brandon was probably one of the first things that became somewhat of a, I'm not going to a challenge, but it was something new for us because we had been scheduling all those hogs into other plants prior to that.

So working with the Maple Leaf employees to get the hogs in there as efficiently as possible, into our assembly yards and out of our assembly yards into the Brandon plant when they can use them was certainly part of our responsibility and then working with the producers that were going direct to the plant to get delivery times and to be on time.

One of the things that we were somewhat concerned at here, because at our facilities the producers have been given a tremendous amount of flexibility over the years, was the fact that they were going to be given a time and a window of time to be there and if there was an issue with that window of time it was that our producers were showing up too early and Maple Leaf was not able to receive them until the which they were scheduled to deliver their hogs.

So, for the most part, I believe everybody's gone through a bit of a learning curve and there will continue to be little tweakings to the system to get it running even smoother.

Mohr notes producers had plenty of advance notice and he believes the quick adjustment is a credit to the producers and the trucking companies that worked closely with the co-op to get those hogs into Brandon and other destinations.

Further Reading

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