A regional meat processor in southwestern Ontario’s Huron County will get rural development funding for more smokehouses and cookhouses and improved production.
Metzger Meats Products, which processes beef, lamb, pork, chicken and turkey at Hensall, about 55 km north of London, will get $350,000 from the province’s Rural Economic Development program for its planned expansions.
Between the new equipment and plans to modernize the plant’s production management system and improve both the productivity and efficiency, the company is expected to increase its smokehouse and ready-to-eat meat production by 400 per cent, the province said Thursday.
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The increased production in turn is expected to create up to 10 new jobs, the province said.
The expansion and modernization will “make Metzger Meats more competitive and help us supply the increasing demand for meat products in Ontario,” company president Gerhard Metzger said in the province’s release.
“This will also allow us to continue to support local farms and create more jobs for the people in the Hensall area.”
Meztger, a family-owned business, operates a provincially licensed and inspected abattoir which last saw a major expansion in 2002, when the company built out a new processing area and a larger retail store on its existing building.
The company bills itself as its own pork supplier, operating a hog farm at nearby Dashwood that has bred a cross of Landrace, Yorkshire and Berkshire hogs for an animal that’s “superior in meat quality.”
Laurie Nichol, executive director of the Ontario Independent Meat Processors, said in the government’s release that the Metzgers’ and province’s investments speak to “the growth opportunities for Ontario’s provincially-licensed abattoirs and free-standing meat processing facilities.”
