Baking&Snack - November 2011 - 19

Although designed to serve a single province, Canada Bread’s new CA$100 million, 385,000-sq-ft bakery at Hamilton, ON, takes aim at global competitiveness.

BY LAURIE GORTON usinesses can’t move ahead by clinging to the past, especially in categories as competitive as wholesale baking. With an eye toward the industry’s emerging global structure, Canada Bread executives looked at the company’s fresh bakery operations in the country’s most populous province and found them lacking. It was time to take the initiative, to take aim at higher goals. On Sept. 28, the company celebrated the grand opening of a high-tech bakery at Hamilton, ON. Now operating two of nine planned lines, the facility embodies the hopes and future of Etobicoke, ON-based Canada Bread Co., Ltd. “We invested more than CA$100 million in this new bakery to support long-term growth as the leading producer of value-added bakery products in Canada,” said Michael McCain, president and CEO, Maple Leaf Foods, Toronto, ON, and chairman, Canada Bread. While planning the new bakery, the company sought scale and efficiency. “We invested in technology. We invested in scale. We invested in productivity,” Mr. McCain said. “We expect that will allow us to ensure

our competitiveness for many, many years to come, but we left space in this facility for innovation and growth as well.” Current plans call for further capacity to make English muffins, tortillas and rye bread. In addition to lines that more than replace the output at bakeries that it’s closing in the region, Canada Bread built in about 50,000 sq ft and infrastructure to address coming needs. “We have some footprint for unidentified new product activity because innovation and growth in our product line are important to our future as well,” Mr. McCain noted. THE NUMBERS. By any measure, the Hamilton facility is huge, making it Canada’s largest bakery and bigger than most in the NAFTA trade zone. The 385,000-sq-ft building sits on 25 acres, and when all nine lines are up and running, it will employ 330. The bakery’s eight flour silos, three currently in operation, can hold 140,000 lb each. When the plant goes to three shifts, it will output nearly a quarter-million loaves a day. “When building a new facility and consolidating factories, it makes

sense to take advantage of scale,” said Walter Miller, senior vice-president, operations, Canada Bread. The Hamilton bakery replaces three of the company’s five Ontario plants. These older facilities averaged 70,000 sq ft in size and more than 50 years in age. Some 130 employees from those plants are transferring to the new site. The company plans a stepwise shutdown of the other bakeries, with one to be closed by year’s end and the others in 2012 and 2013. The company will accept some overlap in production capacity ▼ Canada Bread leverages transportation costs by locating its large new bakery at a crossroads site at Hamilton, ON.
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November 2011 / BAKING & SNACK

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Baking&Snack - November 2011

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