It’s been in progress for around 18 months but the BC Tree Fruits (BCTF) major expansion of its packing house facility in Oliver, B.C., is nearly complete.
On Friday Regional-District of Okanagan-Similkameen (RDOS) directors were offered a tour of the new facility.
“This has been a very inspirational tour. It’s great to see this modern technology coming into play here. It’s the only way we can keep ahead of the rest of the world and keep up with the rest of the world,” said RDOS Rural Oliver Area Director Rick Knodel.
“Our area predominantly is agricultural, that’s our main industry. Having this plant here, keeps us close to the plant, keeps the growers close, it’s just a bonus to have it right here. It’s our big economic, we don’t have gold mines, we don’t have logging, it’s farmers. It’s an amazingly good investment for us and it strengthens our tree food industry, which has been under duress for a long time.”
The BCTF facility expansion includes ‘state-of-the-art’ technology and new packing lines in addition to upgrades made back in 2018. The operation is also adding additional cold storage rooms and pre-grading lines.
“The Oliver facility is going through radical transformational change,” said BC Tree Fruits Supply Chain vice-president Craig Ogilvie. “The pre-grade line is running as we speak today. The packaging lines will be up, and running come middle of March in preparation for apple season next year.”
According to BC Tree Fruits the total investment in the project is approximately $60 million. That includes building expansions and infrastructure improvements and the equipment itself which cost approximately $20-22 million.
“We’ve done a lot of due diligence across North America as well as in Europe. We’ve taken a lot of the technological advancements that we saw in Europe itself,” said Ogilvie. “We’ve definitely advanced astronomically from a technological aspect.”
Back in 2022, however, Okanagan farmers gathered in protest of BC Tree Fruits’ decision to shut down packing house operations in the Central Okanagan and move them to Oliver.
Ogilvie says the decision to expand in Oliver simply came down to cost.
“We still have some growers who do not like the decision for us to be in Oliver and it’s up to us as an organization to prove that this decision was the right decision. So that’s what we’re working on, and why we made the investment accordingly,” said Ogilvie.
“Ultimately, if we’re going to do it in the north, it was going to cost us more money. Construction costs and everything else was on the rise. And when we looked to all our facilities Oliver was selected for that reason, purely to make sure we could minimize the impact of the grower return ultimately in the end.”
One technical upgrade is new cameras installed inside the facility to allow farmers to watch live footage of their fruit, instead of making the trip down to the Oliver facility.
“Part of our overall grower experience is to allow them to come in, not physically necessarily be here but to use technology to their advantage, so they can see the fruit being run over the line,” said Ogilvie.