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Hela Spice Canada’s Success Built on Talented People By Lois Harris
C
onstant innovation, creativity and a strong team are the secrets to the nearly 40-year success of Hela Spice Canada, according to President Paul Hoogenboom.
The company’s main business is in designing and formulating custom blends, spice mixtures and seasoning blends for the meat, poultry, vegetarian, bakery and other sectors of the food industry. The Uxbridge-based business – an associate member of Meat & Poultry Ontario (MPO) for four decades - has talented people and state-of-the-art facilities that can provide end-to-end services for customers. “We do a lot of the product development and R&D (research and development) work for major food processing companies across Canada,” he says, adding that he has an R&D centre that employs 10 to 12 people, and the company employs 60 people in total. Hoogenboom is extremely proud to be Canadian, and the company ships about 85 per cent of its product across this country, with the rest going south to the U.S. The firm has doubled in size over the last eight to nine years. He also recognizes the tremendous contribution his staff has made to the success of Hela Spice Canada. “You can’t be successful without great people – they make the company,” he says, adding that all the units work together – from the chefs, food scientists, flavourists and meat technologists working in the R&D centre to the employees on the production floor to quality assurance, sales, marketing, purchasing, finance, IT and administration. “Some of our staff have been here 10, 15, 20, 30 years - we have a real family culture,” he says. “It’s really important that every department works together – we share the glory and we share the blame.” Part of the secret of his success in retaining people is that they are all well-trained for their jobs and everyone has put their fingerprints on the success of the company. The company also pays close attention to health and safety. Hoogenboom says that he’s concerned about the next year, with the fallout from the pandemic creating shortages in supplies and higher input prices.
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BlockTalk - Winter 2021
www.meatpoultryon.ca
