Meat company Olymel and poultry firm Groupe Westco plan to jointly consolidate their poultry production, slaughter, cutting and deboning operations for the entire Maritime region into New Brunswick.
The two companies said in a release Wednesday that this partnership stems from a business relationship formed in 2007.
The deal “brings together
producers and operators with complementary expertise that will make the
poultry supply chain for New Brunswick and the entire Maritimes more
efficient,” the two companies’ CEOs said in their release.
“Producers, poultry industry workers and consumers in New Brunswick
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However, the two companies also said Wednesday that they’re at an impasse in their talks to buy Maple Lodge Farms’ Nadeau Poultry slaughterhouse at St. Francois de Madawaska, west of Edmundston, N.B.
The two said they had been in discussions with Maple Lodge since August last year but that company broke off talks in January.
Olymel and Westco said they were still open to talks with Maple Lodge but if no deal could be reached, the two firms will jointly build a new poultry slaughter plant in the region.
In the meantime, they said, Westco’s slaughtering volume will be “temporarily” moved to an Olymel slaughterhouse in Quebec starting next July 20.
“The industry’s future depends on the
creation of a new business model based on partnership agreements between
producers and processors, and integrates the production chain from breeder to
consumer,” Nadeau said in the two companies’ release.
“A partnership like the one between Westco and Olymel l.p. delivers
better risk sharing and opens up great potential to better serve the markets.”
Westco, also based at St. Francois de Madawaska, is one of the biggest poultry production companies in Canada, with a large market share in New Brunswick’s chicken and turkey production and its own hatcheries, breeding farms and shipping
companies. It also has facilities at Neepawa, Man.
