Higher Slaughter Capacity, Value-Added Processing
Tuesday Jul 19 2011by www.ThePigSite.com News Desk
Last week the federal government announced Hylife Foods, formerly Springhill Farms, a subsidiary of Hylife, will receive C$10 million under the Slaughter Improvement Programme for improvements to its Neepawa hog slaughtering plant including expansion of the cooler and cutting areas and the purchase of new equipment.
Denis Vielfaure, the Chief Operating Officer of Hylife, says the upgrades will expand slaughter capacity and allow more value to be added to the plant's products.
Denis Vielfaure-Hylife
Our goal when we bought the facility about 40 months ago was to diversify the product mix and just not to be pigeonholed.
At that time we were basically in the frozen international market, 90 plus per cent frozen international market so a lot of the upgrades have been done to improve the facility to be able to do fresh product and also to value add to that fresh product which means doing a lot more deboning of primal pieces to sell to our customers.
Also at the same time, the main focus has been to export fresh chilled, specifically to the Japanese market and the Korean market and some Asian markets.
Today we've maxxed out at about 900,000 hogs annually.
With these upgrade it's going to give us the opportunity to have some more throughput, it's going to permit us to have about 50 per cent more throughput, bringing us close to the 1.4 million hogs per year.
Mr Vielfaure notes Hylife Foods sources hogs from within the Hylife production system, from the former owners of the facility and from some independent producers.
He says the bulk of the additional capacity will be filled by hogs from within the Hylife system that are now being processed at other facilities.
ThePigSite News Desk
Back to News
Major grocers jointly pledge stall-free pork by 2022
Canada's hog farmer group hopes a new pledge by eight major grocers to source pork from stall-free operations by the end of 2022 will include more than just moral support for farms to make such changes.
Grocer members of the Retail Council of Canada (RCC) jointly announced Monday they will "work towards sourcing fresh pork...
(read article)
Calgary Co-op weighs stall-free pork
Board to consider non-binding March resolution from membership (read article)
Weekly Overview: PRRS Continues to Challenge US Producers
ANALYSIS - Diseases continue to challenge the world's pig producers. In the US, PRRS continues to be problematical, while foot and mouth disease rumbles on in Russia and there has been the first report of African Swine Fever outbreaks in domestic pigs there since December. Preventative measures have helped Canadian pork producers overcome porcine... (read article)
Reduced Hog Numbers Could Impact Manitoba Pork Processing Plants
read news archiveThe vice chair of Manitoba Pork Council warns the economic pressures that have prompted the provinces pork producers to reduce production threatens the supply of hogs available for Manitoba's pork processing plants, writes Bruce Cochrane. (read article)
