The co-operative said June 17 it will invest $34 million in the former Scotsburn plant at Truro, to “redefine the space within the plant (and) support the development of several business opportunities for Agropur, especially in a growing market.”

Specifically, the capital investment will go to “allow the creation of a new extrusion line for value-added innovation in the premium novelties segment.”

The Truro plant will then become one of Agropur’s “centres of excellence for extrusion-type frozen products,” the co-op said.

In the frozen novelties business, extrusion is used to produce various figures or shapes, which can then retain those forms during later handling and further-processing.

Jeannie van Dyk, the Agropur board’s vice-president, described the move as “the largest plant capital investments made in Canada for the last five years,” adding it “confirms the importance of the Atlantic region for Agropur and our commitment to remain a major player in the region and to pursue the opportunities it presents.”

“The Truro ice cream plant is known for its expertise in dairy processing and the production of frozen treats, and we are very pleased to be able to innovate in this area. Several new projects will be possible because of this investment,” Dominique Benoit, Agropur’s senior vice-president for institutional affairs, said in the same release.

Agropur’s plans to invest in new frozen dairy products for Canada follow an announcement in April from the Canadian arm of food processor Unilever, with similar plans to expand the frozen dessert portfolio it produces at Simcoe, Ont.

Other companies, however, such as French yogurt maker Danone, have recently said they plan to pare back the number of varieties available in their product lines.

The ice cream plant at Truro came to Agropur in 2017, when it bought Scotsburn Co-operative Services — a deal which also included a frozen desserts plant at Lachute, Que. Agropur closed the Lachute plant in 2020 and shifted that site’s work to its other facilities. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Nestle Canada said June 23 it expects to break ground in September for a 26,600-square foot expansion of its London, Ont. plant with “additional buildings, increased refrigeration capacity and other services to support the new capacity.”

The two new production lines, due to be completed by 2023, are expected to generate “more capacity for future growth, resulting in incremental ingredient, packaging, and raw material supplier purchases,” the company said, noting it bought over $45 million of dairy in the area in 2020.

The expansion follows reconfigurations in 2016 to boost the London plant’s capacity and flexibility for more product lines under the Haagen-Dazs brand, which has been processed there for the Canadian market since 1985.

A $51.5 million, 9,000-square foot expansion followed in 2018 “to create more capacity for future growth of Haagen-Dazs and other popular products.”

The latest expansion “allows us to bring even more exciting and innovative products to market and continue to meet consumer demand,” Jayne Payette, Nestle Canada’s president for ice cream, said in the company’s release.

The London plant, which today employs over 800 people, is expected to “create 88 new job opportunities” as a result, the company said. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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In a Monday filing seeking to end the proposed nationwide class action, Ben + Jerry’s said James Ehlers did not plausibly allege why its statements about using cows from Vermont dairies in its “Caring Dairy” program mattered to reasonable consumers.

Ben + Jerry’s also said Ehlers lacked standing to seek future relief because he now knows where its milk and cream come from, and because it has removed “happy cows” from packaging, leaving cartoon cows with “no discernible expression” on the labels.

“They did not look happy to begin with,” Ben + Jerry’s said, joined by its parent Unilever.

Jay Shooster, a lawyer for Ehlers, declined to comment.

In his Oct. 29 complaint filed with the federal court in Burlington, Vermont, Ehlers said that more than half the milk and cream used in Ben + Jerry’s ice cream actually came from “factory-style, mass-production” dairy operations.

He said misleading marketing enabled Ben + Jerry’s to charge premium prices, and violated a Vermont consumer protection law.

Ben + Jerry’s countered that “happy cows” was merely a statement of opinion, known as “puffery,” and could not support the lawsuit.

“Happiness cannot be measured objectively, and Ehlers could not take a cow’s deposition to ask how it feels,” it said.

Founded in 1978 in a renovated gas station, Ben + Jerry’s has long positioned itself as socially conscious. Unilever bought the company in August 2000.

Ehlers lost in the Democratic primary to become Vermont’s governor in 2018.

— Jonathan Stempel is a Reuters correspondent covering U.S. federal and state courts and consumer law from New York.

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Froneri was created after Nestle merged its European ice cream business in 20 countries with R+R, a unit of French private equity firm PAI Partners.

With operations in regions including Latin America and Asia, it is one of the largest ice cream companies in the world with a turnover of around 2.9 billion Swiss francs (C$3.87 billion) as of last year.

Wednesday’s deal expands Froneri’s reach to the United States and is expected to add US$1.8 billion to annual sales.

“(We) are convinced that Froneri’s successful business model can be extended to the U.S. market,” Nestle’s CEO Mark Schneider said.

Nestle owns the rights to Häagen-Dazs in the United States and sells the premium brand in Canada, while Yoplait maker General Mills sells it in other non-U.S. markets.

Since taking over reins at Nestle in 2016, Schneider has embarked on a strategy that focuses on selling premium products in high growth categories such as baby food and coffee, while offloading underperforming businesses.

Earlier this year, the Swiss company put its Herta cold cuts and meat-based products business on the block and sold its skin health business to a consortium led by EQT Partners for 10.2 billion Swiss francs.

“(The Froneri deal) underlines the seismic change going on at Nestle in terms of portfolio transformation to focus on where it thinks it can add value, while rolling those businesses where it thinks others can do better into ventures that do so,” Kepler Cheuvreux analyst Jon Cox said.

The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2020 following regulatory approvals, Nestle said.

The maker of Nescafe coffee and KitKat chocolates will continue to run its remaining ice cream businesses in Canada, Latin America and Asia.

Nestle’s ice cream brands in the Canadian market, along with Häagen-Dazs, include Real Dairy, Parlour, Drumstick, Goodnorth, Sundae and frozen desserts made with its candy brands such as Coffee Crisp, Smarties and KitKat.

— Reporting for Reuters by Michael Shields in Zurich and Nivedita Balu and Siddharth Cavale in Bangalore. Includes files by Glacier FarmMedia Network staff.

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Agropur Co-operative announced Friday it plans to close the former Les Aliments Lebel plant at Lachute, Que., just northwest of Montreal, in August 2020 and transfer the plant’s operations to other Agropur sites.

The co-op said the plant closure, which is expected to affect 177 employees, is meant to allow Agropur to “optimize its ice cream manufacturing operations,” as it “needs to make the requisite efforts in a highly competitive market.”

The Lachute plant, which makes ice cream and frozen novelties, was run by Les Aliments Lebel until 2015, when that company was taken over by Truro, N.S.-based Scotsburn Co-operative Services. The Lachute plant at the time was Quebec’s largest for making ice cream and frozen desserts.

Agropur in turn bought Scotsburn in early 2017, including its plants at Truro and Lachute and the Scotsburn brand name. That deal was announced in 2016 but was delayed pending approval from the federal Competition Bureau.

After closing that deal, Agropur “made a strategic decision to concentrate its ice cream manufacturing operations at two other Canadian facilities” in Truro and Edmonton, the co-operative said Friday.

Longueuil, Que.-based Agropur said Friday it’s “aware of the impact this decision will have.”

Affected employees, the company said, will be able to take advantage of available programs, such as severance packages employment opportunities at other Agropur sites, and an assistance program for workers and their families. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Cultivated painstakingly over years from an orchid plant, vanilla is the second most expensive spice in the world, after saffron.

In less than five years, the wholesale price has risen nearly 500 per cent, partly because of growing global demand for healthy, natural ingredients. But supply is an issue too: Cyclones, drought and crop-theft have hit Madagascar in recent years, slashing into the tender crop’s quality and quantity. The African island nation produces about 80 per cent of the world’s vanilla.

For McCormick and Co., the world’s largest spice company, the scarcity of vanilla has become too big a risk to ignore, spurring it to begin cultivating an alternative source on the north coast of Papua, Indonesia. McCormick, which sells vanilla and its extract to retailers, restaurants and packaged food makers, said it has been passing the higher costs on to buyers.

The price of black whole-bean Madagascar vanilla, the benchmark product, costs $520 per kilo (all figures US$). While this isn’t quite the spice’s record-high of $635 per kilo — reached after a ruinous cyclone in 2017 — it is still nearly six times the price of $87.50 per kilo in early 2015.

Back-to-back typhoons in 2017 and 2018 “definitely put input pressure on costs,” Nestle U.S. CEO Steve Presley recently told Reuters.

The world’s No. 1 food company raised prices for U.S. ice cream products in 2017, partly due to mounting vanilla prices, he said. The Swiss food giant makes Haagen-Dazs, Edy’s and Skinny Cow ice creams, which tout natural vanilla flavouring or beans on their labels.

General Mills, which sells Haagen-Dazs outside the United States and in the brand’s international ice cream parlours, said higher vanilla costs were forcing prices upward.

Now, Donald Pratt, managing director of McCormick’s global procurement arm, said the company is looking to Indonesia as a possible solution to the industry’s supply problem.

But pulling this off may be an uphill task.

Indonesia produces only about 100 tonnes of whole vanilla beans a year, a far cry from Madagascar’s output of about 2,000 tonnes, Pratt said. And some others who have tried to cultivate a secondary source for vanilla have not been successful — Unilever’s Ben and Jerry’s, for instance, “invested heavily” in a similar project that backfired in Uganda.

‘The dark side of vanilla’

Vanilla — sometimes called green gold — is so coveted thieves will kill for it.

“This is the dark side of vanilla. You don’t realize because it’s such a sweet thing,” said Cheryl Pinto of Ben and Jerry’s, which uses vanilla in most of its ice creams, as well as in other items such as cookie-dough chunks. Pinto said she is in charge of managing the company’s supply chain with a “social mission” in mind.

To protect their crop in Uganda, “farmers were sleeping in these fields and there were murders and beatings,” she said. “It was awful.”

This month, when setting harvest dates, the Ugandan government called out “cases of theft and loss of lives” spurred by higher prices. The violence goes both ways: Last year, Reuters reported Malagasy growers defending their fields by beating apprehended suspects to death.

Vanilla is valuable largely because it is laborious to grow.

New vanilla vines take three to four years to produce orchids and can only be pollinated — by hand — a few days each year during a pre-dawn, four-hour window. From bloom to sale, the average production cycle is 16-18 months, and 600 hand-pollinated flowers yield only about one kilo of dried beans.

The vines can flourish only if intertwined with small trees that provide support and shade. And they must be grown close to the equator.

Bourbon vanilla, which McCormick sells, is by far the most popular variety in the world. Though it has historically been cultivated in Mexico, it mostly has been produced in Madagascar for the past century because many farmers elsewhere found it such a time-consuming, delicate crop, not worth the uncertainty and price fluctuations.

Pratt said he doesn’t yet know how much Indonesia would have to produce to calm market prices.

Tam Hun Man Tombo, a vanilla exporter in Madagascar, is skeptical farmers elsewhere are up to the task.

“I’ve been in the vanilla business for more than 30 years, and every time I hear the same refrain: Buyers are looking for other origins, buyers will be working with farmers in other countries,” he said.

“It is a threat to which we are accustomed. But we do not fear that too much. Indonesia cannot produce vanilla as good as Madagascar.”

To boost production quickly, McCormick is scaling up training programs in Papuan farming communities. To produce beans of Madagascar’s quality — to which consumers are accustomed — McCormick has been changing some practices related to soil and water management.

McCormick is in discussions with CARE, a non-governmental organization that helped re-establish the market in Madagascar after the 2017 cyclone destroyed about 30 per cent of the island’s vanilla crops. The agency has founded co-operatives in Indonesia as well as Madagascar that provide training for growers — often women — on crop production and management, as well as aspects of financial literacy.

CARE has suggested other geographic alternatives, as well, including Uganda and Tanzania, said Elly Kaganzi, deputy director of CARE’s agriculture and market systems.

Pinto told Reuters Ben and Jerry’s efforts in Uganda foundered, however, because eastern buyers — mainly from China — swooped in and “showed up to the village with a boatload of cash” ahead of the government-sanctioned harvest date.

“We have not been able to get any vanilla out of Uganda,” Pinto said.

Ben and Jerry’s says it hasn’t raised prices due to vanilla costs, choosing to absorb them and stay competitive. But retail prices for other companies’ vanilla-containing products, from coffee sweeteners to yogurt to extract, continue marching upward.

As of May 30, a two-fluid ounce bottle of McCormick’s Vanilla Extract from Walmart.com cost $8.12, up from $5.94 in May 2015, according to the retail consulting firm GlobalData.

“Vanilla has always been a store-cupboard staple, a common product,” said Neil Saunders, who heads the firm. “Consumers might be surprised at the high cost, but what can they do if everyone from Amazon to Walmart is raising prices?”

— Reporting for Reuters by Richa Naidu in Chicago and Lovasoa Rabary in Antananarivo.

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Lisa Dyck, owner of the Cornell Creme ice cream brand, began producing a line of hand-crafted ice cream in 2013, using milk from the family dairy farm northeast of Winnipeg between Beausejour and Anola.

Flavours with mouth-watering names such as Velvety Chocolate Truffle and Lemon Meringue and others were almost an overnight success and Cornell Creme’s full-butter fat ice cream was soon selling at premium prices in stores and restaurants across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario.

Their demise has nothing to do with product demand, Dyck said Tuesday after announcing her plans on social media to pull the plug.

“It’s certainly not for lack of selling product or lack of support from our customers. That’s been amazing.

“It’s production issues.”

Her troubles have been mounting as unexpected costs skyrocketed, she said.

The operation really took a hit as global supplies for natural vanilla tightened, she said. Their product used only natural vanilla but the price went from $50 up to $500/lb. after cyclones destroyed crops in Madagascar last year, where about 85 per cent of the world’s vanilla is produced.

She could have changed her recipe, as other processors using natural vanilla have done, but she was adamant that she would not, she said.

“A lot of companies do things differently. I just wasn’t willing to do it. I tried to ride the storm of the price but it’s just not coming down.”

Other costs have mounted since switching production over from the University of Manitoba’s dairy pilot plant to the federally inspected Notre Dame Creamery in January 2016 and moving to a full distribution model for the product.

A big challenge all through was doing almost all of the work herself, Dyck said.

“It was kind of the perfect storm of things happening to us,” she said.

“I just got burnt out. I just couldn’t continue.”

Closing down Cornell Creme is a painful decision and she’s been overwhelmed by the outpouring of customer support since announcing it.

In fact, it was this intensely close relationship with customers that kept her going, even probably past the point when she should have, she said.

“All those relationships we made, we made person to person. We’ve done a really good job of branding ourselves.

“It’s just sad,” she continued. “My heart is with my customers and my stores right now.”

Cornell Creme began after Dyck made a few batches of homemade ice cream with a kitchen-table ice cream maker her family gave her as a gift. The taste of the ice cream so impressed friends and family they urged her to try commercializing it.

The provincial dairy sector applauded the launch of the made-in-Manitoba ice cream company, noting it set a great example of product innovation for the industry.

The business website emphasized the Dycks’ care of their 120-cow herd, explaining the barn’s loose-housing and other production practices for herd health and well-being, such as the animals’ mattresses, ‘hoovicures’ they received twice yearly, and even posting the animals’ registered names with Holstein Canada.

Cornell Creme never became a large-scale production company in its six years of operation, and continued to use only milk from the Dycks’ own herd.

Last year the company produced over 20,000 litres of ice cream, “which is quite small for a processor,” she added.

The difficulties that led to shutting down point to how tough niche-market food processing is, and the impact unexpected spikes in costs of production can have, she said.

“You need deep pockets to do this. I think at this point it will take investors and someone willing to buy the label.”

— Lorraine Stevenson is a reporter for the Manitoba Co-operator at Carman, Man.

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Dawne founded Grenkow Holsteins near Stonewall, a half-hour north of Winnipeg with husband Allan Grenkow in 1978, milking 42 cows with strap-buckets — a far cry from the sleek milking robots used by the Grenkows today.

“It’s amazing to see,” she says. “When they are ready to go in for milking, there is never a big herd, there is just one or so, then they will finish and go on their way, and then another cow will just get up, say ‘oh, okay’, and then it goes in to be milked too.”

The operation didn’t just jump from buckets to robots, however. The farm’s move to greater automation had been hard eased by decades of business decisions designed to build more flexibility into the operation.

“We started with the strap-buckets and then the step-saver and then we put the milk line in,” Dawne reminisces. “I remember, it was $8,000 back in 1978 because every single person thought that we were nuts and it was waste of money and a terrible thing to do.”

As early adopters of technology, Lloyd says scepticism is something they’ve encountered and learned to anticipate.

“Even when we decided to go with robots or an automated voluntary milking system… at the time that was not quite acceptable yet; it wasn’t the norm,” Lloyd says. Now, eight years after they made their move, Manitoba is leading the country in automated milking systems.

Today, the farm milks between 100 and 110 cows at any given time, but both Dawne and Lloyd say expansion was only possible because of increasing automation. With just Dawne, Allan and Lloyd managing the farm and doing chores, it’s a tight operation, run with precision.

“The reason we got to where we are today is probably because you and Dad took chances back then on automation,” says Lloyd, turning to Dawne. “We’re here now because of automation, because if we weren’t able to automate like this, we’d be an old facility and maybe that would have been the push to do something different, different farming or maybe even another industry.”

The farm doesn’t rely on hired help, although Lloyd’s sister lends a hand when she can and there are other relatives who pitch in from time to time. Dawne says that while bringing in employees has worked well for other dairy producers, the size of their operation hasn’t lent itself to hired help. Likewise, the farm’s proximity to Winnipeg means there are a lot of job postings to compete with when looking for employees.

Lloyd estimates that automation in their dairy barn does the work of close to two people, but says it’s not quite a quid pro quo. While the operation isn’t spending money on additional salaries, automation doesn’t come cheap either, and robots still require maintenance, care and attention.

Still, the benefits are clear.

“Before, it took all of us to get 68 cows down and we would spend most of the day doing labour, simple tasks,” Dawne says. “Now, with the same work crew, we’re able to do 100 or 110 cows. We’re not quite double what we did, but we can do almost twice as much with the same work force and have a little better lifestyle throughout the day. We have more flexibility because of the automation.”

Lloyd jokes that his three young kids still say he spends too much time at work, but the flexibility lets him spend time with them when it’s important. That same flexibility also makes it easier to handle the cropping side of the business.

And while technology is still at the forefront of business and planning decisions, the Grenkows are also making investments in social license. You might even call them “delicious” investments.

“You’ve got to try the Salty Carl… it’s salted caramel and it’s pretty amazing,” says Lloyd, referencing one of the many ice cream flavours made with milk from the Grenkow farm through an arrangement with Chaeban Ice Cream in Winnipeg.

A portion of the milk produced on the farm goes directly to the small-scale processor, which shares information about the milk and the farm it comes from with customers, emphasizing the local nature of the product and touting the high quality of Canadian dairy products.

“They were looking for a local producer so they could use their milk and market it as being local and they picked us,” Lloyd says, noting the farm’s proximity to Winnipeg likely played a role in the decision as well.

“Of course, I like to think we’re friendly, happy people to work with,” he adds with a chuckle.

But in terms of finances, partnering with a local ice cream manufacturer doesn’t change the Grenkow’s bottom line. Under the supply managed system, milk is sold at a constant price regardless of its end destination.

“To do this, so our milk goes directly to him, is more of a nice social bonus,” says Lloyd. “But there is no financial incentive, there’s no bonus to ship our milk to Joseph (Chaeban) and make more money… everyone is the same, every producer gets paid the same.”

At the end of the day, partnering with a small processor was an important chance to connect with the broader community and show how much care dairy farmers put into their product. Given that milk is normally pooled, Lloyd also says it was a neat opportunity for friends and family to taste something made with milk from their farm.

“It was exciting because we really felt like we were a part of it,” says Dawne. “We went to the open house and we met the family, they came to the farm… we met his dad who was a very interesting, very funny, cheese-maker from Africa. I don’t care where you are in the world, if you meet another dairy farmer… you can sit there and talk and talk.”

Chaeban was born to Lebanese parents in Germany and his father studied cheesemaking in Europe before opening a cheese factory in Tunisia. The younger Chaeban then picked up the trade, moving to Winnipeg with his Syrian-born wife to work at Santorini Dairies. He then made the leap to ice cream with business partner Darryl Stewart, a man he meet through the South Osborne Syrian Refugee Initiative while helping his wife’s extended family flee civil war.

Chaeban says he knows how much work goes into milk production, and he knew from day one that having a relationship with the farmers supplying his small plant would be key for him and his customers.

“It is very hard to say thank you to Manitoba farmers if you do not put a face to it,” he says. “Now people coming into my shop know exactly where the milk is coming from and I can tell them about the hard work they are doing at this farm and how good the quality of the milk is… I know it’s only one farmer, but it’s going across the whole board indirectly this way.”

For Henry Holtmann, vice-chair of Dairy Farmers of Manitoba, every small processor that opens its doors offers an opportunity for producers to engage in the broader community and further cement their social license to operate.

“We want to tell our story and… our biggest asset is the people that produce the product, so I think it creates engagement and brings us closer to our customers by having these small processors and producers talking one-on-one,” says Holtmann, who farms near the Grenkows. “And yes, maybe we can’t get our message out to the masses this way, but every story, big or little, every contact is important in building support.”

For those who are sceptical of supply management’s ability to support small processors, Lloyd sees the partnership between the Grenkows and Chaeban Ice Cream as proof positive that there is room for everyone to thrive in the supply managed system. He adds that it’s not about asking why small processors should enter a supply managed system, it’s about asking, “why not?”

“Of all the different processors out there, Joseph (Chaeban) is on the same level as any other processor, so if small processors like Joseph want to buy milk and make a product, they can do it, supply management is not a restriction to what you can do,” Holtmann says. “If everybody communicates, anybody can process anything knowing they get a great product because it’s a supply managed product, so it’s great for producers, consumers and everybody.”

Holtmann says that dairy boards across Canada hold back a certain allocation of what is called discretionary milk, specifically to facilitate small- and medium-sized projects.

“If somebody comes to us with an idea, we’re able to support them,” he says. “And we don’t mind if they want to come on stream with a traditional product, but we are very much interested in specialty products… that may be something that’s behind a single-source farm, or a totally new product or maybe a new process. These are all things we want to encourage, and supply management has that built into the system.”

Lloyd adds that supporting small processors also helps build processing capacity across the milk pool. For several years, Manitoba had been lacking in processing capacity, but over the last year new plants have opened, both large and small.

“You’re not driven by profit, you’re not saying, ‘Well, I’m going to end it here to make more money,’ but it’s something that makes the whole industry better,” says Lloyd, adding that at the end of the day, having a healthy industry with a solid social license to operate is good for the farm’s bottom line.

To that end, Grenkow Holsteins has also opened its doors to the public during the province’s Open Farm Day in years past.

“I’d like to do it again, but it is a lot of work,” Dawne says, noting it was Lloyd’s young son Connor who first suggested they take part so his friends could see what dairy farming is all about. “But what I loved about it, what I really, really enjoyed, is because of our location, there are so many young families that come out from the city, and we just love to show them, you know, that this is what it is like on the farm. People really don’t know what a dairy is like, what it does; you’re distanced from the farm.”

Already four generations deep, the Grenkows say it’s too early to know if there will be a fifth generation of dairy farmers in the future. But they do know what direction they’d like to see their farm move in the coming years.

More automation could mean more cows, more time or both, and Dawne adds it could also draw those younger generations of Grenkows towards farming. “I wouldn’t want them to work like we worked,” Dawne says. “That’s not to say they shouldn’t work hard, but hard in other ways.”

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The company’s London, Ont. ice cream plant, which has operated since 1966 and supplies brands such as Haagen-Dazs, Drumstick, Parlour and Skinny Cow for all of Canada, is in the midst of a four-phase, $51.5 million renovation.

Groundwork has already begun for the phase announced Friday, which the company said will boost the factory’s footprint by 9,000 square feet “to create more capacity for future growth of Haagen-Dazs and other popular products.”

The expansion is expected to be operational early next year, the company said in a release, creating 12 “new job opportunities” and shifting 45 jobs from seasonal part-time status to full-time employment.

Swiss-based Nestle, which has operated in Canada since 1918 and has its Canadian head office at North York, Ont., didn’t specify Friday how much more milk the London plant will require, or by how much the expansion will boost its capacity.

However, it said the “resulting production” from the expansion “will increase ingredient, packaging and raw material supplier purchases,” and noted it’s “one of the largest purchasers of Canadian dairy for its extensive portfolio of market-leading products.”

The London plant’s overhaul began in early 2016 with “reconfiguration and consolidation of production lines to increase its capacity and flexibility for Haagen-Dazs.” Nestle has produced the Haagen-Dazs brand for North America under license from the Pillsbury Group since 2002.

In its second phase, the London plant added a second production line for Drumstick, “to further meet the ever-increasing demand for the popular frozen treat.” Nestle has made Drumstick cones since it bought the Drumstick Company in 1991.

The third phase, Nestle said, “helped to modernize the existing processes to allow for greater flexibility within the production lines.”

The Ontario government, through its Southwestern Ontario Development Fund, announced Friday it has put up $390,750 toward the expansion, “supporting an additional investment of $2,214,250 from the company.”

The development fund money, Nestle said Friday, went specifically into “an early phase of the investment which enhanced the cleaning technology for each individual production line, a step that was essential to the success of the expansion.”

Ontario Agriculture Minister Jeff Leal said Friday the province’s funding “is helping create good jobs and economic opportunities for workers, dairy farmers and communities throughout the London area.” — AGCanada.com Network

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Agropur Co-operative on Thursday announced it has bought the assets of Truro, N.S.-based Scotsburn Co-operative Services, which include the company’s plants in Truro and in Lachute, Que. as well as the Scotsburn brand name.

The two plants produce over 50 million litres of frozen dairy goods and book annual sales of over $150 million in Scotsburn-branded and private label products, Agropur said.

Financial terms of the deal weren’t mentioned in Agropur’s release and a company spokesperson wasn’t immediately available Thursday. The deal was first announced in late November but required approval from the federal Competition Bureau.

“This transaction will strengthen our presence in the ice cream market and enable us to better serve our retail partners on a national basis,” Agropur CEO Robert Coallier said Thursday.

Longueuil, Que.-based Agropur already makes and sells ice cream in Eastern and Atlantic Canada under its Farmers, Island Farms, Central Dairies and Northumberland brands.

Scotsburn Ice Cream Co. board chairman Robbie MacGregor on Thursday described the deal as “the best solution to ensure the future of local dairy production and processing,” adding that “Agropur is here to stay.”

The sale puts an end to the Scotsburn co-operative’s dairy processing business, which dated back to 1900, with the forming of the Scotsburn Creamery Co. by local farmers to set up a butter plant.

The Scotsburn co-op had been making retail ice cream since 1948 and frozen novelties since 1998, when it became the first Canadian company to own and operate an ice cream glacier machine.

Scotsburn expanded its ice cream business westward in 2015 when it bought Les Aliments Lebel, whose Lachute, Que. plant is the province’s largest for making ice cream and frozen desserts. Scotsburn also recently closed its plants in Newfoundland and New Brunswick.

Scotsburn had also been in the fluid milk business since 1966, but sold those operations in 2014 to another Quebec dairy sector giant, Saputo, for $61 million. — AGCanada.com Network

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