Maple Leaf Foods Inc. is selling its Rothsay Concentrates
rendering business to Darling International Inc. of Irving, Texas.
The deal $645-million deal will give Darling a dominant hold
on Canada’s rendering industry.
Maple Leaf says it’s going to use the money to reduce its
debt load.
Rothsay has plants at Moorefield and Dundas, Ont., Montreal
and Foxtrap, Que., Winnipeg, Man., and Truro, N.S.
Rothsay Concentrates was started in the 1960s by the late
George Piller of Kitchener. Maple Leaf Mills bought it in 1969.
Canada Packers bought the plant at Dundas in 1980 and that
same year the Young Group bought the five plants that are now part of Rothsay.
The McCain family, with backing from the Ontario Teachers’
Pension Fund, bought the merged Canada Packers-Maple Leaf Mills business in
1995. By that time Maple Leaf Foods Inc. owned both the Young Group’s plants
and the Canada Packers’ plant at Dundas.
Maple Leaf has used its ownership of feed milling, rendering
and hatcheries to drive deals in the poultry industry, but in the last decade
has unwound that vertical integration.
It has sold its feed division, its turkey hatchery and
farms, its chicken quota and now its rendering plants. The company is
concentrating on buying butchered meat from others and converting it into
retail-ready products such as sausages and cold cuts.
Darling is the largest rendering business in the United
States and also processes remains from the bakery industry.
Some of its plants convert animal fats into biodiesel.
Rothsay has a plant at Montreal that produces biodiesel.
