More than 250 casual and part-time employees have been temporarily laid off work at Australia’s Port Lincoln Tuna Processors after the company's main tuna canning contract with Heinz-Greenseas was switched to a tuna cannery in Thailand.
But the future looks bright for the city's largest private employer with canning scheduled to restart on September 1.
The company's main tuna canning contract has been taken over by Simplot Australia, and while work has ceased at the cannery in the transition period, the management is keen to let the community know the future looks bright.
General manager Lindsay Guillot said while the negotiations over the last year and then the transition had been quite stressful for the company, meetings with the new company as recently as Tuesday made him optimistic. "We will grow better than we have in the past and the new owners have great faith in our operation," Guillot said. "We have already received fixed orders and have plans to start canning again soon."
The decision to halt production was made when Simplot wanted to inventory and clear existing stock it purchased as part of the deal with Unilever.
Guillot said the local board of directors of Port Lincoln Tuna Processors had invested about $20 million into the factory over recent years making it one of the most high-tech, efficient factories in the world.
While the main canning operations had been shut down for about a month, work still continued on other new packaging projects such as flavor pouches under the Maggi brand for the Nestle corporation. "We can basically do anything they ask," Guillot said.
The multi-national corporation Unilever decided to sell its rights to the John West brand in Australia and Asia and Simplot Australia, a division the worldwide potato chip and food company owned by an American family, decided to purchase the high-profile John West brand for around $150 million. "They paid a lot of money for it and will have to make it work," Guillot said.
Simplot already produces well-known food brands in Australia such as Edgell and Birds Eye, Leggo's, Sealord fish, Chicko and others. But Guillot said the new ownership would not impact on the current tuna can products that would still be sold under the John West brand.
However Heinz-Greenseas, the same company that closed its Eden cannery four years ago, had just pulled its contract with Port Lincoln Tuna Processors.
Guillot said it was disappointing that Greanseas had chosen to take its canning operations to Thailand when the factory had invested so much in developing a partnership and a quality product. He said the local cannery prided itself on its quality product and hoped consumers continued to support Australia's only tuna cannery.
Another mission for Guillot is to reduce what he called "unfair global tariffs" that saw importers of foreign tuna paying only five per cent while his factory had to pay tariffs of up to 30 per cent to get its products into Asia, Europe and the United States.
New ownership of Port Lincoln Tuna Processors’ purchasing officer Mandy Thompson is pictured with the traditional John West can while her colleague Carly Koselski holds stir-fry flavor pouches made in the factory under the Maggi brand.
