Canada: Tomato canning plant happy to call Ottawa home
Hirzel Canning traces its origins back to 1923 , with the business staying in the family for four generations of Hirzels, including Karl Hirzel, operations director for the Ottawa plant.
Located in the former Buckeye Sugar Company building, Hirzel has been in business in Ottawa since 1982, with this plant focused mainly on bulk production for other food manufacturers.
“We try to seek out area food manufacturers, like Lakeview Farms in Delphos,” Hirzel said. “We sell tomatoes to them, and they’ve been great customers living very close to us here.”
As a brand, Dei Fratelli sells canned tomato products throughout the Midwest, from the Dakotas to western Pennsylvania, with most of the consumer products produced at its Pemberville facility.
“Locally, we sell at Meijer, Kroger, Walmart and a lot of the mid- to smaller-tier chains, like Chief,” Hirzel said.
More than three decades after coming to Ottawa, Hirzel Canning has grown into a sizeable operation, processing between 950 and 1,000 tons of tomatoes with a workforce of more than 150. The tomatoes are collected from 32 growers from throughout the region and up into Michigan, as well as its own farming operation in Putnam County. For Hirzel, this emphasizes how well tomatoes do in the Midwest.
“Peeled tomatoes are what the Midwest does well,” he said. “Places like California produce a lot of tomatoes as well, but they’re more into tomato paste.”
As the plant has expanded, the company has designed its own conveyor system, taking tomatoes from the truck to the final packaging, allowing for cleaning, sorting, peeling and dicing along the way.
“We use varieties of Roma tomatoes,” Hirzel said. “They all have that oblong shape, and they give us good peeling characteristics, colour and flavour.”
Hirzel also takes pride in the fact that all tomato breeding for Dei Fratelli is done through traditional cross-breeding, rather than using genetically modified tomatoes.
“It’s got a bad stigma right now, anyway, so we’re fortunate that we didn’t go in that direction,” he said.
That philosophy of staying true to the original tomato is evident in Dei Fratelli’s Truly Tomato line, produced in part in the Ottawa plant. This line includes diced tomatoes and juices produced with no artificial ingredients.
For now, Hirzel Canning Company & Farms is continuing to enjoy regional success with hopes of future growth in the food production industry.
“We want to focus on what we do really well, which is the fresh-picked tomatoes,” Hirzel said. “We continue to grow a little bit every year.”
Source: limaohio.com
