-
Source: ONE News -
Related
East Coast food processor Cedenco Foods has confirmed it is closing one of its factories, resulting in at least 125 seasonal workers losing their jobs.
The Gisborne-based company told staff on Friday they would be shutting their retort factory, which heats vacuum-packed corn cobs.
The company has cited a drop in international demand for corn cobs and kernels as the reason for the closure.
Cedenco's New Zealand manager Richard Lawrence said all other businesses including the main factory in Gisborne, a Hawke's Bay factory and an Australian processing plant would operate as normal.
As well as the loss of 125 jobs at the seasonal peak, growers, contractors and all the industries that service the factory and growers would be affected.
Gisborne manager Richard Thorp said Cedenco was forecasting a reduction of up to 30% of the land required for its corn programme. This amounted to 700 hectares.
The company had to look at the parts of its business that were not going so well, and focus on the parts of the business that were very sound, Thorp said.
The retort factory was formerly owned by Sunrise Coast and operated as Convenience Foods until sold to Cedenco in 2005.
Cedenco has the largest tomato processing factory in the southern hemisphere at Echuca, in Victoria.
It is one of New Zealand's biggest vegetable processors, with two Gisborne factories, a processing plant at Whakatu in Hawke's Bay and a business in Ohakune, in the Central North Island.
The company has said it hoped the redundant workers would find employment at other Cedenco plants in Gisborne.
