Centennial Foods of Calgary opened its new food processing plant in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The plant will employ up to 190 people to make frozen meat products for markets in North America and southeast Asia. Production at the Centennial Foods plant will begin later this month with a start-up staff of 50. The number of employees will gradually increase to the full complement of up to 190 by the time the plant is in full production over the next few years. Centennial is a family-owned food service, distribution and value-added manufacturing company that was established in 1967. In addition to the new Saskatoon facility, it has two manufacturing plants in Calgary and eight food distribution facilities throughout western Canada.

The largest mozzarella cheese plant in the U.S. is beginning to take shape in Lemoore, Calif. The plant is owned by Leprino Foods Company (Denver, Colo.), which is the world's largest producer of mozzarella cheese and plans to stay that way. Construction began back in February of 2001 on this $150 million state-of-the-art cheese plant that will convert some six million pounds per day of California grade A milk into 600,000 pounds per day of mozzarella cheese. The plant's by-products, whey protein and lactose, will also be marketed to producers of products like baby formula and animal feeds. The design-build firm, Big D Construction (Salt Lake City, Utah), has constructed the 500,000 square foot building near Leprino's existing Lemoore East cheese processing facility, approximately 30 miles south of Fresno, California. The new plant is expected to be operational by September of 2002. Founded in 1950, the family-owned Leprino Foods is the world's largest producer of mozzarella cheese and remains singularly focused upon making the finest mozzarella and whey products. The company currently operates eleven plants across the U.S. and manages their own refrigerated transport company.