by Marc Laframboise, MMNN Contributor

Many months of development, planning and construction will soon come to fruition for the hard-working people of Waycobah First Nation. This community, located on the shores of the Bras d’Or Lakes in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, will soon cut the ribbon for the grand opening of its new state-of-the-art fish processing plant. The new facility is a major piece of the community’s diversification plan put in place to expand its ever growing commercial fishing enterprise (CFE).

“We are all very excited,” said the community’s Fisheries and Natural Resources Director Phil Drinnan. “This vital piece of our business development puzzle will create new jobs for community members and greatly increase the revenues of our CFE. We can’t wait for things to get rolling,” added Mr. Drinnan.

The plant will begin its operations by processing trout raised at the Band-owned aquaculture farms located within the community, ten minutes away from the new plant. The very successful trout aquaculture facility produces over one million pounds of trout per year.

The plant will have the capacity to produce roughly 20,000 pounds of processed trout per day. It was designed to meet current and projected market requirements. The overall design productivity for the plant is 85 pounds per man-hour. The bulk of the new employees will gut and clean the fish and the remainder will assure quality control and perform packing, logistics, supervision and management duties. The govern ...