Diageo plant a big win for Sarnia-lambton area
$245-million investment by liquor giant also seen as good news for local farmers
This week's announcement that the maker of Crown Royal whisky plans to open a $245-million distillery on Moore Line is big news for Canada, as well as the Sarnia area, says the head of Spirits Canada.
“We haven't seen a new distillery announced or built since the mid-1960s,” said Jan Westcott, CEO of Canada's spirits industry organization.
“This is a pretty historic moment.”
Diageo, the company based in the United Kingdom that makes Crown Royal, said Wednesday the new distillery will be able to produce up to 20 million litres of absolute alcohol annually. Construction on the 161-hectare site in St. Clair Township is expected to begin later this year and be completed by the first half of 2025.
The site will include a blending operation and warehouse space. The company said it will employ “dozens” of workers.
“It's a huge vote of confidence for that area,” Westcott said.
“Southwestern Ontario is already a powerhouse of spirits production, given Hiram Walker (in Windsor) and Diageo's operation in Amherstburg, but this is just going to sort of blow it up and make it even more so,” he said.
A $245-million project will result in a “huge plant,” Westcott said. “It's no small thing.”
Westcott said the spirits industry already sources “a huge amount of our grain in Lambton and Essex counties.”
Distilling uses corn, rye and wheat and the opening of the new facility will help grain farmers in the region, Westcott said.
“We've been an industry that has been extremely proud of fact that all of the product we make in Canada is sourced from Canadian farmers, and in Ontario that's particularly true,” Westcott said. “One hundred per cent of what we use it grown by Ontario farmers, mostly down in southwestern Ontario.”
“We're excited to see another appropriate development in our community,” said Emery Huszka, a director with the Grain Farmers of Ontario representing growers in Lambton County.
“It's going to certainly add to our capacity for moving our raw product, our grains, along to a more economically important contribution to an already important contribution that agriculture makes,” Huszka said.
The Sarnia-lambton Economic Partnership says Lambton is home to more than 2,000 farms and more than 202,342 hectares of farmland.
It's said to be Ontario's thirdlargest producer of corn, at 21.5 million bushels a year, and wheat, at six million bushels a year, the partnership says.
The distillery will be just one road over from Suncor's ethanol plant which is billed as the largest in Canada with its capacity to produce 400 million litres of ethanol a year.
The plant that opened in 2006 uses 40 million bushels of corn annually, which accounts for 20 per cent of Ontario's annual corn crop, according to Suncor's website.
The Sarnia area has been known mostly as home of the so-called Chemical Valley collection of refineries and chemical plants using oil and natural gas as their feedstocks, but the region has been branching out in recent years and working to attract other industries, including biochemical manufactures.
Farming is also one of Lambton County's top industries, so the community has also been working to attract food processing industries and the distillery is the first large one landed by the region.
“While we have had some food and beverage investment in recent years, it certainly hasn't been on this scale,” said Matthew Slotwinski, with the Sarnia-lambton Economic Partnership.
During a presentation in February to Lambton County council, the partnership said a food ingredient manufacturing company had made a condition offer on land in the county for a potential $170-million project.