Dylan Yantzi can’t wait to start canning. He is the newly minted meat cannery manager at Mennonite Central Committee Ontario (MCCO), and his enthusiasm for the work ahead was palpable when he took me for a tour of the then-unfinished meat cannery at the MCC Resource Centre (The Hub) in New Hamburg, Ontario, in December.
MCC Ontario held the grand opening of the facility on January 18.
The new cannery has been in the works for four years. Yantzi works full-time for the cannery, and a few other MCCO staff have duties connected to it. It will take a minimum of six volunteers to operate. Yantzi hopes for five to 10 regular volunteers who will help alongside groups of five to 20 who will come to can for periods of a few days to a week.
Photo: A.S. Compton
The new facility is 929 square metres (10,000 square feet) and cost approximately $1.2 million to build and equip. Projected annual operating costs are in the range of $400,000, depending on the quantity of meat processed, with a goal of 60,000 cans of nutritious food produced annually. “We hope to grow, as we know there is a need for this meat in places around the world as well as our local communities. We also have [capacity] to can year-round, and we estimate we have the capacity to [produce] around 750,000 pounds [340,000 kilograms],” said Yantzi.
Meat canning is one of MCC’s longest-standing projects, according to Michelle Brenneman, executive director at MCCO. During World War II, North American Mennonites saw that people in Europe were starving and wanted to help with canned goods from their own pantries, but MCC realized that glass jars wouldn’t do well on ships. They saw the need for metal canning, but that required very specific and expensive equipment. The resulting mobile meat canner was a work of “imagination and innovation,” Brenneman said. It visited locations that had volunteers ready for it. The first mobile canner began operating in 1945.
Between American and Canadian locations, the mobile canner has processed 17 million kilograms of meat.
Crossing the border into Canada with the mobile meat canner was always challenging. When the pandemic began in 2020, those challenges became insurmountable. People at MCC returned to those early days of imagination and innovation. With the idea of a stationary cannery, they reused old retorts (large pressure cookers) from the Heinz factory in Leamington, Ontario, as well as a 75-year-old—but still up to spec—can-sealing machine from a factory in Montreal.
Food insecurity is high, as is ambition for the meat cannery. Operations will begin in mid-March, with the goal of canning 41,000 kilograms (90,000 pounds) of meat in the first year, double the amount canned when the mobile canner last came to Canada in 2019.
Meat will be sourced from local farmers, mainly turkey and chicken. They are able to process pork, although pork is not often requested by international partners.
Because the mobile canner can no longer cross the border, MCC is hoping that Canadians across the country will mobilize to bring teams to this new stationary cannery. The hope is that groups can travel to New Hamburg and volunteer for a week or even a few days. Yantzi is hopeful they’ll find boarding for these short-term volunteers.
Yantzi has been part of this project for almost a year. He has a lot of longer-term goals, including canning vegetables and increasing the number of canning days and quantity of meat processed. He said they aren’t canning beef because doing so would involve a lot of a lot more paperwork, but in time, if people were interested in donating cattle, they might be able to make it happen.
Anyone interested in volunteering or donating directly to the cannery can contact Yantzi at dylanyantzi@mcco.ca.
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