UPDATE: FOOD giant Heinz will cut its Australian workforce by 20 per cent, closing down a plant in northern Victoria and cutting jobs at its Golden Circle cannery in Brisbane.
Under the global strategy announced yesterday, Heinz will shift beetroot processing from its Brisbane factory to one it owns in Hastings in New Zealand.
In addition to the 160 jobs going at the Brisbane plant, a tomato sauce factory at Girgarre in northern Victoria will close, throwing 146 people out of work, while 33 jobs will be lost at Heinz's plant at Wagga Wagga in southern NSW.
Heinz Australia chief executive Nigel Comer denied the move to New Zealand was being undertaken because production was cheaper there than in Australia.
"It's not so much a matter of (New Zealand) being more cost-effective; it's just that there's a duplication of the infrastructure and the factories across the region," he said yesterday. "It's been a trend of ours over quite a number of years to actually move production between countries."
It was also investing $20 million to upgrade the beverage manufacturing facilities at Northgate and $5 million at Echuca's baby food facility.
Friday's announcement comes after Heinz announced to the New York Stock Exchange that its raised its dividend and profit forecast as it plans to cut as many as 1,000 jobs world wide.
According to analysts, the cuts amount to about three per cent of its workforce.
Ever since Heinz bought the Northgate cannery from Golden Circle two years ago, this move was inevitable.
Heinz secured the beetroot processing plant at Hastings when it purchased Watties, a New Zealand food processor with a similar profile to that of Golden Circle in Australia.
The Northgate factory is best known as a pineapple cannery, and this function will continue on site.
But the 600 workers at the Northgate factory in the heart of Wayne Swan's electorate face months of not knowing if they will still have a job after the downsizing is completed in November.
The factory workers at Northgate are not the only losers out of the decision to stop processing beetroot on the site.
Nine farmers in Queensland's Lockyer Valley who supply beetroot for processing and canning will have to switch to other crops.
The Lockyer Valley, inland from Brisbane, was hit hard in the floods in January, but Mr Comer said yesterday the company would financially assist the affected farmers into new crops.
The net result of the decision is that, after this year, tinned beetroot on Australia's supermarket shelves will come from New Zealand rather than Australia.
When Mr Roben started working at the Northgate cannery in 1982, there were more than 2000 people on staff, but now there are only about 600, with 160 of them to go under the rationalisation plan.
Full story, The Australian.
