New man at Larsens, company losing money

BY SARA KEDYY

Kings County Register

Berwick’s Larsens plant has a new manager.

Maple Leaf hired Mike Lee, the plant manager of the Canard chicken processing plant the company closed in April. Lee started work at the pork processing plant at the end of July, replacing Mike Larsen, who left the company his family founded and owned for many years earlier that month when Maple Leaf asked him to transfer out of province.

The Larsens plant is one of the operations Maple Leaf expects will be affected by its “strategy to centralize its primary pork processing operations” in Brandon, Manitoba by the end of 2009.

“It’s a mistake,” says Maple Leaf spokeswoman Lynda Kuhn, after media reports on the company’s second quarter financial results listed the Annapolis Valley plant as one already shut down. She says there is nothing within the release August 3 of the quarter’s statements that would have said Larsens was closed, and there are no plans or timeline associated with any future action at this time.

Maple Leaf lost money in the second quarter ending June 30, 2007: a net loss of $1.7 million, compared to net earnings of $21.2 million in the previous quarter. In July, the company announced plans to close its Winnipeg pork processing plant this October. The plant employs 145 people and handles up to 20,000 hogs a week. The company’s Etobicoke, ON value-added processing plant will also shut down by October. Maple Leaf will add a second shift in Brandon, bringing staffing up to 2,800.

Berwick’s Larsens facility processes hogs and does some value-added work, employing over 400 workers.