Goodman Fielder announced on Monday it will close its oils manufacturing plant at Mascot south of Sydney and start building a new state-of-the-art packaged food manufacturing plant in the western suburbs.
GF Managing Director Peter Margin said the Mascot plant was an old facility and not up to modern efficiency standards.
“I regret the necessity of closing the plant and the impact this will have on our people who work at the site, but unfortunately the recent loss of a major bulk oils contract has made the plant sub-economic to operate.
This means that we needed to bring forward our plans to restructure our manufacturing base and build the new plant.” Construction of the new plant is expected to start in early 2008, with completion and the closure of Mascot expected to be around June 2009. “When this new low-cost, flexible manufacturing facility is completed, the bulk oil production that is currently undertaken at the Mascot plant will be transferred to existing plants in Brisbane and Melbourne. Retail grocery product production will be transferred from Mascot to the new western Sydney plant,” Peter said. The new site, which will be located close to distribution centres operated by Goodman Fielder’s major customers, will be developed and owned by a third party and operated by Goodman Fielder under a lease arrangement.
“We plan to invest around $30 million in new plant and equipment and the site will also include a modern fully equipped research and development facility to ensure we stay at the forefront of new product innovation. Part of the new facility will include a bulk tank farm from where we will be able to distribute the freshest oil at competitive prices to our Sydney customers,” Peter said. The Mascot plant employs around 120 people and the company will endeavour to place employees in other parts of the business. Where this cannot be achieved, full redundancy entitlements will be paid and outplacement services made available.
Total Mascot site closure costs will be about $13 million, including $5 million that has been previously announced.
