Canada Foods Plant

The Canada Foods Plant was a fruit and vegtable processing factory in Kentville located immediately wesy of the Kentville Roundhouse on West Main Street from the 1940s until 2016. It was one of the DAR's largest customers in postwar Kentville. The plant was built by M. W. Graves in the middle of World War Two to expand his large fruit processing business in Berwick with a potato drying plant to serve the booming market for army rations. Graves purchased the land beside the roundhouse owned by Herbert Dennison for the plant. The Dennison barn, which had often appeared in DAR photos at Kentville was demolished for the plant and a portion of the ridge along West Main Street was leveled. This created fill to divert the Cornwallis River by the roundhouse and provide a large storage yard for the plant. The factory was a 300-foot-long building which included a tall brick chimney lettered "Canada Foods" which loomed behind the Kentville Roundhouse and appears in many DAR yard photos. The Canada Foods was the largest potato dehydration plant in the British Commonwealth during the war. It was served by a 750-foot-long spur running off the North 4 track of the Kentville Railyard.

In 1950, with the drop in demand for army rations, the plant was re-organized to produce juice and pickles and employed 45 men and 90 women during its peak fall and winter operating seasons. The plant purchased the Kentville Roundhouse from the DAR in the 1960s and converted it to a warehouse, connected to the Canada Foods Plant by a conveyor and covered passageway. In October 1966 the plant was heavily damaged in a major fire at the height of its fall operation. Cement blocks and metal containers were blown 300 feet across the DAR Kentville Railyard yard tracks. A string of boxcars along the plan spur containing juice, frozen blueberries and machinery was also destroyed. Fire fighters managed to save the pickle plant at the west end and the storage building on the east end. The plant was quickly rebuilt within weeks.

Graves sold his valley operations in the 1960s and the Canada Foods Plant continued under several other owners. Its final owner, Great Valley Juices, owned by the Quebec-based A. Lassonde company, transferred most of the production work to a new factory in Port Williams. The Canada Foods Plant became mainly a warehouse for the Port Williams factory. The warehouse was closed in 2014 and demolished by Great Valley Juices in June 2016.

Gallery

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  Canada Foods Plant behind the Kentville roundhouse and machine shop from the coaling tower, 1940s or 50s.

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  South side of the Kentville Railyard looking west with the Kentville Track Scale with the Canada Foods Plant, October 1990.

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  Kentville Railyard looking east from the West Main Street crossing with the Canada Foods Plant, the Kentville Roundhouse, and the Kentville Car Shop, 1992.