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Saputo puts its Courtenay plant out to pasture


Operation has long history of serving Vancouver Island dairies


by GRANTWARKENTIN COURTENAY – The closure


of a 118-year-old dairy on Vancouver Island last month is the mundane end to a remarkable, century-long chapter in BC’s agricultural history.


Quebec dairy giant Saputo was the final owner of a milk processing plant in Courtenay that began in 1901 as the ambitious dream of a handful of Comox Valley farmers and pioneers. The plant,


constructed when Courtenay was still dirt roads and shanties, is now hidden in plain sight behind strip malls and big box stores. It was slated to close its


doors for good on March 31. When it is torn down and replaced with more strip malls and big-box stores, few will notice. Most people purchasing the plant’s milk in Vancouver Island stores – sold under the Comox Valley Islander brand – have no idea it was about as


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The Saputo operation in Courtenay is closing. GRANT WARKENTIN PHOTO


local as you could get, short of going to a farm and milking the cows yourself. The brand, billed as “Honest


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Goodness from the Comox Valley,” may have to change now, since there will no longer be any easy way to distinguish the milk as being “from the Comox Valley.” Most milk from Comox Valley-area farmers will be sent to Victoria. There, it will be processed at a plant owned by another Quebec- based dairy company, Saputo’s competitor Agropur, then trucked back up-Island for sale, possibly under Agropur’s Island Farms brand. Some Comox Valley milk will be sent to Saputo’s processing facility in Burnaby and may still come back to the island packaged as Comox Valley Islander milk. But there


are no guarantees. “In terms of the products made in this facility, at this time, we anticipate that some of the production will be integrated into other Saputo plants,” Saputo said in a statement.


No other information about


the future of the brand was available from Saputo or from the union representing the plant’s employees. According to the BC Milk


Marketing Board, Island dairy farmers and processors face logistical challenges that prompted the closure. Currently, supply and processing capacity don’t match up, creating an inefficient system for transporting milk to and from processing plants. “We are currently short in


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the volume of milk produced on Vancouver Island by dairy farmers to meet the processor requirements on Vancouver Island,” said a statement from the board. “This results in five to six loads (40,000 litres per load) of milk shipped from the Fraser Valley to the island each week. With the closure of the Courtenay plant, we will have a surplus of milk produced on the island that is beyond processor requirements on Vancouver Island. We don’t expect that the other processing plants on Vancouver Island will have a need to take all of the milk on the island. Therefore, we will need to ship approximately one to two loads off the island each week.”


Good jobs lost


Saputo never formally announced the decision to close the plant; it just sort of happened, just as it had to other small Saputo-owned milk processing plants in Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia during the last few years. Aging facilities get


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replaced all the time and the Courtenay plant was already 20 years old when Saputo bought it along with the other assets that came when it purchased Dairyland in 2001. It’s not surprising the closure didn’t get more attention. People knew it would happen eventually. That doesn’t make it easier


for the workers who lost their jobs, says Paul Barton, secretary-treasurer for Teamsters Local 464, which represents the plant’s unionized employees. “Those were very well-paid union jobs and there aren’t a lot of those left in that part of


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