Scotian Gold

The Scotian Gold Co-operative was created in 1957, evolving out of the old United Fruit Companies co-operative of apple growers who worked together to store, pack, ship and market their apples together in co-op warehouses all along the DAR. To cope with the collapse of the British apple export market, the United Fruit Company built a pair of large warehouses and a food processing plant at Coldbrook in 1946 to process apples more efficiently and develop new products. The company reorganized in 1957 and took the name "Scotian Gold" from a successful brand of apple juice and sauce being used by the company. Scotian Gold grew steadily expanded in the 1960s until it occupied a large site on both sides of the DAR mainline at Coldbrook. Scotia Gold had a long private spur at Mile 4.2 on the Kentville Subdivision serving the plant, its cold storage warehouses capacity of 240,000 bins of apples, along with the co-op's fertilizer operation, Valley Fertilizer Limited. Scotia Gold was a large DAR customer generating hundreds of inbound and outbound cars until the decline of the the DAR in the 1980s. Today the Scotia Gold facility remains the largest apple plant in the Maritimes, processing 60% of the region's apple crop.

Gallery

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  The United Fruit Companies apple processing and storage facility at Coldbrook that became Scotian Gold, October, 1949.

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  Spur to Scotian Gold at Coldbrook, 1993.

References and Footnotes

• 1969 Memorandum of General Information Corporate Info, page 10
• 1961 Dominion Atlantic Railway Employee Time Table - October 29, 1961, page 4
• Maire Bishop, "Memories of Coldbrook" (1999) Kings Historical Society, p. 76
• Valley Gold by Ann Hutton

External Links

History of Scotia Gold]