BARRHEAD – Long awaited news on the future of two of the County of Barrhead’s lots in the Kiel Industrial Park is finally official.
Those two lots have been sold to GFR Pharma, the owners of GFR Ingredients, a producer and supplier of plant-based proteins. Its current plant is in Barrhead in the old Northern Alberta Dairy Pool (also known as Nu-Maid Dairies) facility.
County manager Debbie Oyarzun announced the sale at the April 5 council meeting, adding that GFR has also expressed interest in buying another lot in the future.
Reeve Doug Drozd said he is looking forward to meeting with GFR to learn more, specifically what the company’s plans are for the property.
"We know they are in the value-added agriculture space, which is a great fit for our community," he said. "It was our No. 1 priority when we created the industrial park."
Oyarzun added the sale to GFR goes "a long way in meeting the first pillar of the county's strategic plan.
"By increasing our non-residential assessment, it is also going to make a significant difference in our overall tax base," she said. "Right now, we are heavily dependent on residential taxes."
Drozd added he hoped the sale to GFR would spur further interest in Kiel properties.
"Value-added industries tend to gather in the same space. Hopefully, this will be one of many to come," he said. "This is the first indication we've had about potential growth in a long time."
Brett Hodson, one of GFR's principal owners, said in an April 12 interview that they have been looking at options to expand their Barrhead facility for several years.
"The facility is at capacity, and because of its location, we are landlocked," he said, adding they were looking at potential locations anywhere in Western Canada but favoured Alberta.
Hodson added they narrowed down the possibilities to a few locations, including the county's Kiel Industrial Park.
"We started talking to them about the infrastructure capacity, water, power and sewer, and needless to say, it piqued our interest," he said.
The lots are the first the municipality has sold at the industrial park.
However, Hodson noted the last two years during the pandemic complicated and slowed matters significantly.
"But we are now getting out of it, and over the last year, we have been ramping up our activities to the point where we were ready to go ahead and purchase the first two lots," he said, adding that, in total GFR is looking at potentially buying 20 acres.
Hodson said the initial plan is to ramp up its GFR's production capabilities. He added the company specializes in plant-protein extraction by taking out the starch and the fibre.
"You then spray-dry that product, and it becomes something that goes into various products in the food world," Hodson said, noting they make products for themselves as well as a wide range of international customers. "A lot of them are working with novel ingredients to find different types of applications for plant protein."
One of the more common methods they use is extracting the protein from yellow peas and using it to form the base for protein supplement drinks. GFR also extracts protein from hemp that is used in cereals and other products for the bodybuilding industry.
Hodson said as part of their expansion plans, GFR hopes to build several expandable plants, the first of which would be about three times the size of their current facility.
"That is our plan right now, but we are working with our customers to determine the right size and configuration we need," he said. "That is why we needed to make sure the property we selected could handle the diversity of all these different products."
Hodson added that GFR often does several different types of plant-protein extraction processes simultaneously.
"Our customers really like it because it allows them to be up and running in a larger facility, in a much quicker time frame," he said.
As for whether the county's Non-Residential Tax Incentive Bylaw tipped the scale in Barrhead's favour, Hodson said it was just one of many factors.
Under the bylaw, a non-residential property that made improvements through new construction, machinery and/or replacing or upgrading a facility that increased the assessed value is eligible to receive a portion of their property tax exempted for up to three years. The amount exempted depends on the value of improvements.
"It's never one thing that does it. It was one of 50 factors, which when they come together builds a business case," he said. "What is compelling about it is that we are already in the community, and we are very happy with our team and employees and the skill sets they have developed. They are a tremendous asset."
Hodson added the county has also made the process easier.
"It is a small community, and you feel that you are working with people who want to improve it, instead of just being some bureaucrat. They have been very professional and have done everything they could to get it moved along," he said.
Background on Kiel Industrial
In late June 2018, Royal Canadian Cannabis (RCC) put a deposit down on a lot at the Kiel Industrial Park to build a medical marijuana growing and production facility. However, the sale of the property fell through in 2020.
The county bought the quarter section of land located at NE 27-59-3-W5, which is immediately south of the Northplex plant on Range Road 32, for $575,000 from the Kiel family in 2012 for the expressed purpose of creating an industrial park. The land is zoned as direct control.
In September, the county asked the Barrhead Regional Water Commission to include the installation of new water filtration trains in their 2022 budget. They also asked for the town's permission to allow them to install a sanitary pre-treatment component in its lagoon wastewater treatment facility.
