With reports of multiple cases of COVID-19 at the Maple Leaf Foods plant in Brandon, MB, the pork processor voluntarily suspended pork exports to China temporarily.
Chinese protocol requires any plant reporting a COVID-19 positive case to suspend exports to China temporarily.
Worker absenteeism forced Maple Leaf to temporarily redirect some of the hog farmer live hogs coming daily to the plant. The company said it believes this is short-term, not a material financial event, given the company’s market diversity.
“We are confident in our Maple Leaf Safety Promise – providing consumers with safe, great-tasting food made in a safe working environment – but, we respect China’s new import protocols for Canadian products and are working cooperatively with Canadian and Chinese authorities to resume exports quickly,” said Michael McCain, Maple Leaf Foods President and CEO.
Andrew Dickson, Manitoba Pork general manager, said those employees with the COVID-19 virus contracted it from the community. In other words, it’s a cluster thing, and apparently it started with one case and just spread within a cluster.
“There’s no evidence at all, according to the Public Health Authority, who did the inspection, that these workers might have picked the disease up at the plant,” said Dickson. “That reduced workforce created some challenges in terms of staff assigned to the various duties within the plant.”
Maple Leaf Foods had to reduce the intake of some of the hogs that come into the plant daily. The producers are shifting the pigs to other plants temporarily, both in Manitoba and in other provinces, until they sort out the plant’s issue.
Dickson said the plant would sort out the issue and try to stabilize the workforce to continue taking the average level of pigs, plant capacity 90,000 a week, taking before this outbreak of COVID-19 cases.
Dickson doesn’t think any excess live hogs are going to the United States, except a standard export of weanling pigs has continued to flow. There are some sows and other types of pigs that would not usually go to a federally inspected plant in Manitoba. Some of those continue to flow as part of the regular business for many, many years. They’ll tend to go to either sausage plants and so on in the US, with the usual market pigs, some of them are going to other plants in western Canada.
He said Maple Leaf is working with the producers to ensure that the pigs’ shipped from their farms avoids any backlog problems on farms. •
— By Harry Siemens
Maple Leaf Foods update
Update as of September 18.
The COVID-19 outbreak among staff at the Maple Leaf Foods pork processing plant in Brandon may be over as the company reported zero active cases at the plant as of 10 a.m. Thursday September 17th.
There are now zero new cases and 93 recovered cases involving workers from the plant, Maple Leaf vice president of communications and public affairs said Thursday (September 17th) evening.
The plant has been dealing with an ongoing outbreak since its first employee tested positive for COVID-19 in late July. •
