Maple Leaf Consumer Foods estimates it will take about three weeks to clear up a backlog of hogs that resulted from a series of road closures earlier in the week.
Monday morning most of the roads in southern Manitoba had been closed as a result of freezing rain.
Maple Leaf director of procurement for western Canada Jason Manness says the highest concentration of freezing rain was in southeastern Manitoba, from where the Brandon plant sources a significant volume of hogs, resulting in low volumes of movement Monday and Tuesday from certain areas of Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday we were running at probably just around 50 percent capacity of the Brandon plant and so one full shift was impacted throughout those three days.
We are now back to full two shift capacity here on Thursday as well as forecast to do that Friday.
We are also, to help assist with the reduced capacity earlier in the week, planning a Saturday one shift processing for this Saturday so that’s already lined up and ready to go.
We’re trying to help accommodate the reduced capacity earlier in the week because of the weather.
We’ll do our best over the next two to three weeks to get everybody cleaned up in the country, fill the sales commitments that we have to our customers.
It’ll take probably two to three weeks to make that happen.
Unfortunately next week we have a holiday, or fortunately for the people that want a holiday it’s good but for this business we have a holiday next Monday, Louis Riel Day, which will then compound a little bit and therefore it’ll take at least two or three weeks to catch up the volume that we missed this week.
Manness says, while it’s difficult to put a dollar value on these types disruptions, they result in additional costs to everyone in the production chain from the producer right through to the consumer.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
