In February this year, The Lockyer Valley Farmers board announced plans for a new $40 million beetroot canning facility in Grantham, west of Brisbane. The cannery would also process locally grown peas, beans, potatoes and corn, and would be built with no government assistance, the board said.
The board expected to create 50 new jobs in the cannery's first year of operation and 100 new jobs by its third when the cannery reached full production capacity. Following its feasibility study, the board also stated the cannery would earn back the initial outlay within 10 years and turn a profit within two years.
On 2 June, it had to announce that its plans had changed. A major investor pulled out. The board had been approached by an international corporate investor in late February. That investor backed out in the last week of May, leaving the board $15 to $20 million short of funds to get the cannery up and running.
“So that's a very big challenge for us and it tells us a couple of really important things -- just because someone comes to you excitedly wanting to be involved, we should never assume that that's true. And secondly, that investing in a start-up enterprise in manufacturing in Australia is very hard," board president, Colin Dorber, stated.
The board intends that the new cannery will produce both for Australian and international markets.
“It’s not only going to be a cannery and provide other forms of packed materials for national retailers in Australia; our goal is that we will have our own brand and we are going out to attack the rest of the world,” Dorber stated.
The plan is for the new cannery to provide opportunities for local growers who have moved away from growing beetroot when Golden Circle shifted its processing facility offshore in 2011.
The board has been soliciting expressions of interest from local growers to supply the new cannery since February.
“Some (growers) have moved on; some haven’t. But there will be opportunities for more growers than there have previously been,” Dorber promised.
Dorber stated that the cannery is structured to grow from an output of 25 million cans in year one, to 72 million by 2020.
