Alberta’s plans to boost its irrigated acres are being met near the starting line with a major french fry producer’s plans to double the capacity of its plant there.
McCain Foods announced Monday it will put up $600 million to build two new production lines for frozen french fries and potato specialty goods at its Coaldale plant at Chin, Alta., about 25 km east of Lethbridge.
The Toronto-based company said it expects to start construction “later this year,” but hasn’t yet given a timeline for the project’s completion.
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McCain did say that once fully operational, the Coaldale expansion will require another 260 hourly and salaried employees, more than doubling its current workforce there to 485.
McCain Foods CEO Max Koeune described the $600 million outlay as the “largest global investment in our 65-year history… underscoring our commitment to the future of agriculture and innovation in Canada.”
The company said the expansion will also follow best practices in line with its previously announced goal of cutting its worldwide greenhouse gas emissions in half by the end of the 2020s.
Thus, McCain said, the Coaldale plant expansion will include wind turbines and solar panels to provide “100 per cent renewable electricity.”
Biogas from the plant’s wastewater treatment will be run back to its steam boilers to offset the plant’s use of natural gas, and a water recycling system will also be put in place to reclaim potable water for processing, McCain added.
McCain’s Coaldale plant was first built in 2000, focused at the time on french fries for markets in the Eastern Hemisphere. The plant underwent a relatively smaller expansion in 2017 that boosted its capacity by an estimated 15 per cent.
McCain on Monday didn’t put a number on how much more potato production it will need to supply the plant once the expansion is online.
A McCain representative did say via email the new expansion “will bolster our existing relationships with our farmers and require us to build new farmer partnerships along the way to meet requirements.”
According to Statistics Canada, Alberta’s potato growers produced 26.81 million hundredweight (cwt) of potatoes on 71,325 harvested acres in 2022, putting it just out ahead of both Prince Edward Island and Manitoba in terms of total annual yield by province.
Southern Alberta’s potatoes go mainly to french fries and other frozen potato goods, processed in that region by Lamb Weston and Cavendish Farms as well as McCain for domestic and export markets.
The region is also home to two major potato chip processing plants, operated by Old Dutch and Pepsico-Frito Lay. Another snack food maker, Super-Pufft, announced plans last year for an Alberta potato chip plant at Airdrie.
Potato crops in Alberta are grown under irrigation, which today covers about 1.8 million acres of the province’s farmland.
Another 230,000 acres are to be added through a $933 million infrastructure project announced in 2021 to be financed by the province, the Canada Infrastructure Bank and 10 participating irrigation districts. — Glacier FarmMedia Network
UPDATE, March 14: Article updated to include comment from McCain representative.
