The Lucerne cheese plant gets shut down August 29 throwing 50 workers off the job. Now Sobey’s is selling Lucerne’s western milk division including the Winnipeg plant.
Lucerne has been announcing job cuts all spring so it is very likely that they were preparing it for sale.
The new owners of the milk division of Safeway are Agropur Cooperative of Quebec. The deal was for $356 million and involves long term supply agreements with Safeway and Sobey’s in the west. It should be noted that Lucerne milk is generally what Starbucks uses as well.
It always struck me strange that the Competition Bureau did not force Sobey’s to sell off more of the distribution and manufacturing arms of Safeway. We have seen closures of some Safeways rather than seem them sold to others such as Save On Foods or Co-Op.
It appears no jobs from the milk sale will be lost. The dirty work was done before the division changed hands.
Expect to see more fall out from the sale of Safeway to Sobey’s in the day ahead.
This has been a guest editorial by John Dobbin.
To read more from John, visit his blog Observations, Reservations, Conversations
