The Sunterra Meats plant at Innisfail – Canada’s largest lamb processor – is now a member of the Canada Gold Beef family. Now known as SunGold Specialty Meats, the ownership change became effective February 8.
“It’s a plant where we’re killing lambs, beef for the EU, and branded beef – Canada Gold Beef – for our domestic market and then some bison as well,” said Rick Paskal, chair and co- CEO of Canada Gold Beef.
Though beef may be the name of Canada Gold’s game, lamb will continue to be a priority for the plant.
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“The lamb part of it is essential and vital to operations and sustainability within that plant. We’re very focused on the lamb, and we’re very focused on speciality meats like bison and we slaughter bison there. The other component is our Canada Goldbranded product,” Paskal said.
Operating the plant will be a challenge, but one that simply couldn’t be avoided, Paskal said.
“We couldn’t get anybody to slaughter our product. So we had to go into the arena of purchasing a plant and not by choice, but by necessity, and this is the only thing that we could find that had some viability to it.”
Paskal said the plant is not competing with big plants such as Cargill and XL.
“There’s absolutely no future in that whatsoever. Your costs are so much higher than what their costs are, and they are very, very efficient plants. It’s not that they undersell us in the marketplace, but their cost of production is way lower than ours.”
Canada Gold Beef kept any buzz about the transaction low key, and continues to maintain a low profile.
“To be honest with you, we deliberately don’t say anything to anybody because we think it’s very important to make this business a success before we toot our horns. We are in the marketplace all the time looking for hormone-free cattle, and that’s about all I’d like to say right now. It’s a new business, we’re in the processing business and it’s a significant challenge. We’re trying to make the business successful,” said Paskal.
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“Thelambpartofitisessentialandvitalto
operationsandsustainabilitywithinthatplant.”
RICK PASKAL
CANADA GOLD BEEF
