Olymel Plant Closure

Farms.com
By: Jackie Clark
April 7, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting some food supply chains by necessitating changes in processing-plant operations in an attempt to keep workers safe and healthy.

Processing capacity “is a huge issue for us. Packing plants for the last several months have been operating at capacity and with COVID-19 and social distancing, everyone’s doing their best to be safe and that has had an effect on plants’ capacity,” Eric Schwindt, chair of Ontario Pork, told Farms.com.

Olymel, a pork and poultry production and processing company based in Quebec, announced that it would be closing one of their Quebec pork processing plants for 14 days because of “the growing number of cases of COVID-19 among plant employees, which has reached nine,” a March 29 statement from the company said.

The closure is to prevent further spread of the virus among the nearly 1,000 employees, and give them two weeks to self-isolate before returning to work. The company assured customers that food hygiene and safety was maintained throughout the situation, in a statement released on April 3.

This work stoppage is important from a public health perspective, however, it does add a challenge to the pork industry.

To read the full article please click here.