Best Choice Eggs merges with Ontario Pride

Thursday, May 12, 2011

by BETTER FARMING STAFF

Few details are available about a merger taking place today between an eastern Ontario egg grading co-operative producer-owned company and a Blackstock, Ontario egg grader and marketing business at the centre of a legal dispute with several other major players in the province’s egg industry.

Pierre Barbeau, general manager of Ontario Pride Eggs confirmed Friday that the 11-member cooperative company which has operated the former Monkland egg grading station since 2009, plans to merge with Best Choice Eggs. The deal was to be complete by Friday evening, he said.

Best Choice Eggs is a marketing brand owned by Sweda Farms Limited, Ontario’s third-largest egg grader. The company is suing several individuals, the provincial supply-managed egg marketing board and Canada’s two largest egg graders — Burnbrae Farms Limited. and L. H. Gray & Son Limited — which it contends undermined its business. The claims have not been proven in court.

Today the Ontario Pride Eggs website says “Mr. Peter Huismans, president of Ontario Pride Eggs, is proud to announce that the egg production of Best Choice Eggs, located in Blackstock Ontario will be graded and marketed by Ontario Pride Eggs grading station in Monkland Ontario.”

Barbeau offered few other details. He said the reasons for merging were “personal,” and the name of the new company was undetermined. “We’re not involved” in Best Choice Eggs’ legal actions with other graders, he said.
 
Reached via his cell phone, Barbeau would not disclose his current location, or where the merger was taking place. He would not disclose the number of producers in Sweda’s Best Choice Eggs program that would be affected.
 
Svante Lind, Sweda’s president, could not be reached for comment.

According to Ontario Pride Eggs’ website, 35 egg producers in eastern and western Ontario supply it with 225 million eggs per year.  However the cooperativecompany is part of Groupe-Nutri-Group, a much larger national distribution partnership of several Canadian egg marketers.

Groupe-Nutri-Group’ website says it manages 1.1 billion regular, specialty and process eggs. Other group members include Les Oeufs d’Or in Vald’Or Quebec, Nutri-Oeuf in St. Hyacinthe, Quebec, Supreme Egg Products, a processor based in Etobicoke, Ontario, Countryside Farms in Steinbach Manitoba and Maritime Pride Eggs in Amherst, Nova Scotia. BF