Saskatchewan meat company builds new plant
Saskatchewan-owned and operated Drake Meats Processors Inc. will be expanding operations with a new meat processing facility in Saskatoon.
Construction of the new federally inspected facility is already underway.
The company’s goal is to open the facility’s doors in September 2026 and be fully operational within 12 to 18 months. Once fully operational, the new location is expected to employ 200 people.
“The construction of our new facility is a tremendous milestone in the growth story of Drake,” chief executive officer Kelly Ediger said in the May 20 announcement.
The Ediger family has operated Drake Meats for four generations.
When the company was started as a community meat locker in 1949, Ediger’s grandfather was one of the first employees. His son, Norman, purchased the meat locker and passed it on to his son, Kelly, who has built the company further.
Currently, Drake Meats operates a main plant in Drake, Sask., which is provincially inspected, and leases federally inspected space at the Agri-Food Centre in Saskatoon.
Due to Canada’s interprovincial trade regulations, products from the Drake plant can’t be sold outside of Saskatchewan, while those from the Agri-Food Centre can.
“We’ve grown over the last 10 years,” said Cameron Johnson, the company’s executive chair.
“We’ve grown by taking on space in the Agri-Food Centre. Just at our own plant, we’ve grown about three times the business. So over the next four to five years, we expect to grow three to four times again.”
With space from the Agri-Food Centre, Drake Meats was able to expand its products to grocery locations across Western Canada in stages. However, to grow with the grocery groups’ demand, it was time to scale up.
The new space will further increase capacity. The company estimates that annual production capacity will increase by approximately eight million kilograms, which is about three times its current output.
“We plan to continue to operate the Drake plant, and focus on our customers that are in Saskatchewan,” Johnson said.
“But definitely all of the sales growth outside of the province will be from the new plant.”
The new facility, designed by the Mallot Creek Group, will be 53,000 sq. feet and include technology advancements such as a state-of-the-art tempering room, an automated bacon line, an automated injection system and natural gas smokehouses.
In terms of layout and the use of technology, Johnson says this design creates a new kind of plant.
The tempering room will create more flexibility for the business by enabling the purchase of meat to freeze and temper at a later time. And the decision to run smokehouses on natural gas, rather than electric like at the company’s other current locations, will increase energy efficiency.
“We think it’s going to be good from an efficiency and just an environmental perspective … but also, the design and the advancements that have been made from a quality perspective as well,” said Johnson.
The technology advancements, automation and increased staffing will contribute to the increased production capacity. It will also increase the purchasing of beef and pork from Canadian farmers.
“The new plant is going to do a lot more jerky than we do right now. So, it’s actually going to increase how much, relatively, we do between pork and beef, between the operation today and tomorrow.”
Drake Meats’ priority is to continue to buy locally produced meat.
At the Drake location, the company also operates its own abattoir and deals with several local hog operations directly. For beef, it buys cattle on the market, generally animals that the larger slaughterhouses won’t purchase.
With the new facility, meat will be bought from federal slaughterhouses across the Prairies.
“The way our plant is designed, we can buy from anywhere,” Johnson said.
“But it’s always cheapest if you can buy from home. And we want to support Canada, so we want to make sure there’s a good industry there for us to purchase from.”
Source: producer.com