Anyone entering a Saskatchewan grocery store right now, whether it’s a Co-op, Costco, Sobeys, Loblaws, Safeway or Save On, would have little trouble finding Drake Meats products. Once the company completes its new federally inspected facility in Saskatoon, even more customers will be able to have a taste of Saskatchewan on their dinner plates.
However, besides the substantial jump in production volume and scale, some things will remain the same for the Saskatchewan-based meat producer. Drake Meats currently runs an abattoir and processing plant, both provincially inspected. Provincial production and the company’s head office will remain in Drake, where everything started, right in the heart of the Saskatchewan prairies.
“I’m very proud of the little town that we have and that it’s continuing to grow and to survive,” said Kelly Ediger, owner and CEO of Drake Meats. “It’s been a good fit for us and we want to continue that and make sure that we have secure jobs here at Drake.”
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Located 125 km east of Saskatoon and 140 km north of Regina on Highway 20, the meat processing plant, located right in the centre of the village, employs around 40 people from Drake and surrounding communities. Sausage, bacon, jerky and other pork and beef products have been available across the province for nearly 70 years, but now they are ready to make their mark outside of Saskatchewan.
“We’ve got a very good workforce in the Drake and Lanigan areas. But we said we’re doing this to grow, not to move,” said Drake Meats’s executive chairman, Cameron Johnson. “We want to keep that plant doing what it’s doing and get more volumes.”
The new $60-million facility, located in Saskatoon’s industrial area, will produce eight million kilograms of product, three times more than the current production at their Drake plant. With plans to open in the fall of 2026 and be fully operational within 12 to 18 months, they will eventually employ 200 people when they reach full capacity. The new facility won’t slaughter livestock, but instead source meat from federally inspected plants to process.
Being federally inspected, the focus will be on expanding into Western Canada to start. Drake has already been doing this to some extent through the Saskatchewan Food Industry Development Centre, which has federally inspected processing suites, and through existing relationships they already have with major grocery buyers, said Johnson.
The Food Industry Development Centre is the province’s only commercial incubator for food processing, according to its website. Using it allowed Drake Meats to test other Canadian markets for their Saskatchewan-based products, said Johnson.
“That was one of the first big tests that we had to satisfy — that if we built products for sale in Saskatchewan, would we still have strong customer demand? And by doing that through the food centre, we’re able to validate that.”
Co-op and Costco have been the biggest supporters of the brand, said Johnson, especially with Federated Co-operatives Limited being based in Saskatchewan. Working with the chains where they already have a commercial presence and a customer base, the new facility will be the start of expanding Drake Meats’s products further into Western Canada. Other chains may approach them, but the focus for right now is on existing relationships, said Johnson.
Products will be similar, if not the same, said Ediger, with the focus on a wider reach.
As this demand continues to grow, the new plant will be ready to expand as soon as it is built. Johnson is expecting another expansion in about five to six years down the road. The design of the plant was inspired by European production architecture. Mallot Creek out of Toronto is designing the new facility, said Johnson.
“The plant is designed almost like a ‘U’ where you go down the production side, and then you go through the smokehouses — because most of our product is smoked — and then you go back down the packaging side,” said Johnson. “We really built out that middle area… The walls are such that we can open the walls up and expand both the production and packaging areas.”
The plant will not be big enough to produce for the entire country, said Johnson, so an expansion into Eastern Canada would require another facility after this plant reaches its full capacity.
As the Canadian government focuses on eliminating interprovincial barriers — Prime Minister Mark Carney tabled Bill C-5, the Free Trade and Labour Mobility in Canada Act, in June — Johnson sees the growth of Drake Meats as a great example of supporting Canadian production.
“There’s a lot of meat products that come in from the U.S., and if we could grow a plant like Drake, it truly would allow Canada to be less reliant on the U.S. for trade.”
If interprovincial trade barriers loosened, Johnson said there would be little reason the original Drake plant couldn’t also start producing for stores outside the province. But for now, production out of the original plant will remain within Saskatchewan.
“Saskatchewan is still a decent-sized province. For a plant that size, there’ll always be a market there.”
Even though they are expanding into markets outside the province, investments in the expansion have been a provincial effort. Drake Meats was fortunate to have WestCap and their Golden Opportunities Fund as an early investor in the project, said Johnson. With all the moving parts, having the Retail Venture Capital Fund as a major supporter of the venture made a huge difference, he said.
“Having groups like them out there really helped make this thing a reality,” he said.
Other investors have included FCC Capital, as well as a group of local investors also buying into this expansion, said Johnson.
Given the scope of the project, outside investment was a necessity. However, most of the business stock will remain in the Ediger family. Corporate decisions are not always the same as decisions made with family and community in mind, said Ediger, and they want to keep supporting local initiatives without corporate interference.
“We want to be very generous to various charitable organizations that are near and dear to our hearts. Obviously, we want to remain profitable… but we also want to be able to have the freedom to be able to do the charity (work) that we choose to do over the next years.”
Ediger is a second-generation owner of the business and the third to work at the plant. His son, Tyson, is now the fourth generation, and he and the rest of the middle and upper management staff are well prepared to carry on the family tradition, said Ediger.
“They’re basically a generation younger than me and anxious to spread their wings and see what they can do. That’s the way my dad worked with me.”
Tyson has taken the lead on Drake Meats’s “Jerky-in-a-Box” subscription program, said Ediger, a pre-pandemic initiative that has become a large part of their sales. As sales and marketing strategies evolve, this is just one example of what the next generation can do, he said.
No matter the change ahead, whether it’s their reach or their marketing, the past and the future of Drake Meats will remain in the little village where it all started.
