Kruger inaugurates its Sherbrooke tissue plant and announces expansion project
The expansion project will deliver on the company’s vision to make Sherbrooke a major premium-quality tissue product manufacturing hub in North America
Kruger Products officially inaugurated its Sherbrooke Tissue Plant, which was commissioned in 2021, and broke ground at its expansion project where another tissue plant will be built on a site adjacent to the Sherbrooke Plant by 2024. This second project, which represents further investments of $351.5 million, will deliver on the company’s vision to make Sherbrooke a major premium-quality tissue product manufacturing hub in North America, featuring Canada’s most advanced and best-performing TAD tissue machine. In total, the company will have invested nearly $1 billion in the Estrie Region since 2018.
“With this expansion project, we are extremely proud to deliver on our vision to make Sherbrooke a major tissue-product manufacturing hub in North America as well as an outstanding technological showcase that spotlights the Company, the region and our employees’ know-how,” said Dino Bianco, Chief Executive Officer, Kruger Products L.P.
Built in the Brompton Borough, along the Saint-François River, the Kruger Products Sherbrooke Plant required nearly one million person-hours of work and helped to create some 1,700 direct and indirect jobs during the construction phase, which ended on time and on budget in early 2021 despite the challenges of the pandemic.
The Sherbrooke Plant, which has 180 employees, has been performing well above expectations since it was commissioned last year. Furthermore, the Plant benefited from an additional $25-million investment to implement artificial intelligence (AI) functions that make it one of Canada’s best-performing and most technologically advanced manufacturing facilities.
The Sherbrooke Plant was recently honored with two awards at the Sherbrooke Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s 35th Estrie Recognition Gala: the Manufacturing Business Award and the International Visibility Citation Award, which attest to this project’s impact, both in terms of economic benefits and job creation and in terms of the region’s attractiveness to major investors.
SIGNIFICANT EXPANSION PROJECT
The $351.5M expansion project includes the construction of a double-wide tissue machine featuring LDC technology, as well as the installation of two additional converting lines, one in the existing Sherbrooke Plant and the other in the new plant, which will bring the Sherbrooke site’s overall production capacity to more than 130,000 metric tons of high-quality tissue products, including Cashmere UltraLuxe®, Scotties® facial tissue, and SpongeTowels® UltraPROTM.
The construction project, which is to be carried out over the next two years, will require some 660,000 person-hours of work, and generate substantial economic benefits for the region. The project will lead to the creation of 141 additional direct jobs, bringing the total number of jobs at the Brompton site to 348, including those at the biomass cogeneration plant owned and operated by Kruger Specialty Papers. Considering the 46 employees at Kruger Products’ Lennoxville Plant, there will be 394 people working for the Kruger group in the Estrie region.
