Baked goods firm Canada Bread Co. plans to shut a pantry bread bakery in Quebec’s Beauce region and shift a nearby plant’s bread roll production to a third site in the province.
The company, an arm of Mexican bakery firm Grupo Bimbo since 2014, announced Tuesday it will close its bakery at St-Come-Liniere, about 110 km southeast of Quebec City, effective May 19.
“We have been losing volume year-over-year in this facility and have made every effort to maintain the facility,” Jennifer Park, Canada Bread’s vice-president of operations, said in a release.
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“As a result, we must consolidate the volume into another bakery in Quebec where we bake the same products and have the capacity to take on this volume.”
About 56 people working at the plant will get severance and “will also be encouraged to seek employment at other Canada Bread facilities,” the company said.
The company also said Tuesday it will move roll-line production from a Quebec City-area bakery at Beauport to a bakery in the Vincent-Massey area of Quebec City in September.
The “majority of associates” working at Beauport are expected tp transfer to Vincent-Massey by March 2018, when roll production is dialed up to meet summer peak demand.
Canada Bread, whose brands include Bon Matin, Vachon, Ben’s, Pom, Villaggio and Dempster’s, today operates 17 bakeries across the country, counting the St-Come-Liniere site. The company closed a bakery at North Bay, Ont. last summer and its Ben’s Bakery facility in Halifax in 2015.
It emphasized in its release that bread baked at St-Come-Liniere and rolls baked at Beauport will still be baked in Quebec. “Jobs and production will not be moved to other parts of Canada or other countries.”
The exception, Canada Bread said, will be one specific Panini product line, the production of which will be “absorbed” within the network of Wholesome Harvest Baking, a Grupo Bimbo-owned company making frozen and par-baked goods for retailers and in-store bakeries. — AGCanada.com Network
