Last October Hytek, Canada's largest privately owned pork production company, announced its purchase of the Springhill Farms hog slaughtering plant at Neepawa.

Yesterday the sale was completed clearing the way for the La Broquerie based company to begin a two year upgrade and modernization of the plant to accommodate further value-added processing.

Guy Baudry, the CEO of Springhill Farms and Vice President of Hytek says the upgrades will not only secure the long-term future of the plant and its current 350 employees but also create 200 new jobs.

Guy Baudry-Hytek Limited

Hytek will be the 100 percent owner of Springhill Farms so this will fall under the Hytek umbrella.

What it will do is very much compliment our production operations and augment our production operations with processing operations.

Over the next two years we're committed to make significant capital investment here at Springhill.

Our thoughts are is that there will be upgrades, modernization made to the cut floor, made eventually to the kill area, also in doing so to the cooler spaces.

We'll make these upgrades so in turn we can bring this plant to the next level with the objective of, in the future, processing approximately 1.4 million hogs at this facility.

Baudry notes Springhill Farms has been working with a diversified portfolio of suppliers and Hytek intends to continue those relationships.

He says the big focus will be to increase the facility's capacity so, in turn, Hytek will also be able to accommodate more of its own hogs.