Efforts to Bring New Hog Slaughter Capacity to Saskatchewan Remain on Track

CANADA - The Chair of the Saskatchewan Slaughter Plant Initiative reports efforts to bring a new primary pork processing plant to Saskatchewan remain on target for a projected September 2009 opening, Bruce Cochrane.
calendar icon 13 March 2008
clock icon 3 minute read

The Saskatchewan Slaughter plant Initiative, which includes Saskatchewan First Nations, the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board and Big Sky Farms is working to replace slaughter capacity lost with the closure of Mitchell's Gourmet Foods.

The proposed new plant to be located in Saskatoon's north industrial area will begin with a one million head per year capacity expandable to two million head on a double shift.

Initiative Chair Jim Ramsay says an extensive evaluation shows the plan is economically feasible.

Jim Ramsay-Saskatchewan Slaughter Plant Initiative

It shows that it is a sound business concept.

Since we last spoke we completed the business development plan.

We took an extra month to make sure that we had full consideration of the pressures that are in the industry and we reworked the numbers a couple of times over just to make sure we had a good conservative view of what was happening to see if this was based on sound business principles.

There are issues in the industry in Canada specifically and a lot of impacts with respect to the fact that the majority of food processing is actually happening for us into the American mid-west so we had to be very clear about what was going on and our projections on the supply side primarily.

We've had about a one month delay because we want to make sure that we were current on industry pressures and what was happening out there so that slowed us down for all of a month which is not significant over all.

Our plan was to get things going into the summer, possibly into the fall with opening in September of 2009 and we have not had to adjust those dates as of yet.


Ramsay says the business development process focused on marketing and there is interest being expressed by potential marketing partners.

He notes discussions aimed at securing the 100 million dollars needed to finance the first stage of development are underway and remain on track.

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