The Highbury Canco plant in Leamington is a very busy place right now with the tomato harvest underway.
Hundreds of truckloads of tomatoes from across southwestern Ontario continue to arrive at the plant.
Company President Sam Diab says this season has been remarkable.
"Our harvest is ticking along really nice. The crop looks really good, it's a little bigger than we were expecting, so it's a bit of a bumper crop which is good. The tomatoes are really healthy and as I said our team is doing a great job at the factory," says Diab.
It's been five years since Heinz closed the plant in Leamington in June 2014 putting 740 people out of work.
Diab says they now employ hundreds of people.
"Highbury Canco in five years has tripled in size from a dollars perspective," he says. "From an employment perspective we've gone from 250 employees we're now over 600 full-time employees, plus our seasonal and temporary workers. Which take us up into the 800's this time of year."
Over the five weeks of the harvest, Highbury Canco will process around 340-million pounds of tomatoes.
He says they do can tomato juice, but that's not the main product.
"The bulk of the tomatoes actually go into our paste process where we evaporate out water from the tomatoes and condense them into tomato paste" says Diab. "We store that tomato paste and then we use that throughout the year for various products, Classico pasta sauce, baked beans, barbeque sauces, our Kettle Creek, our own Kettle Creek barbeque sauce."
The plant at 148 Erie St. S is a 2.1-million square foot facility that features 24 production lines.
— With files from AM800's Kristylee Varley