Montreal firm scoops up iconic brand
TheSpec.com - Steve Arnold
STONEY CREEK — Somehow it just won’t taste the same knowing it’s not made in Stoney Creek.
Stoney Creek Dairy is selling its ice-cream making business to a Montreal company after efforts to find a new, expanded home in Hamilton failed.
“This is really a sad day for Stoney Creek,” local Councillor Brad Clark said Tuesday. “It’s hard to explain, but people in Stoney Creek feel a real ownership in the the dairy.”
Only the dairy’s manufacturing operation is being closed and moved. The famous ice cream parlour, and adjacent Hutch’s hot dog stand, will remain.
Clark and Hamilton economic development director Neil Everson said the loss of the ice cream plant followed a lengthy effort they made to find it a new home in the city’s Glanbrook North Industrial Park.
Dairy owner Alex Kepecs wanted to move the operations away from his residential Stoney Creek neighbours — people who had been complaining to city council about the noise of his compressors, especially at night.
“The dairy is real icon, but it’s located in a very difficult area,” Everson said. “We’d love to keep this operation, but in an acquisition and consolidation situation there’s not much we can do.”
The identity of the purchaser remains unclear, other than it is a Montreal-based dairy company.
“We did everything we could to move him to Glanbrook, but in the end it didn’t work out,” Clark said. “It all fell apart.”
Among the issues said to have scuttled the deal were the cost of electricity, water and sewage rates, and taxes.
The manufacturing part of the dairy once employed 100 people but that has been reduced to about 30 in recent years as the company struggled with the recession.
“It’s more than just the jobs that are being lost,” Clark said. “This one is going to hurt because the Stoney Creek Dairy was such an icon.
“Being able to get home-made ice cream in Stoney Creek was a real iconic thing to do,” he said.
Its roots go back to 1929 when George Dawson started a dairy in one of his barns, delivering milk door-to-door and to local stores, later moving into developing his own ice cream flavours.
In 1942 the family opened the dairy bar. The business was eventually turned over to George’s son Greg, who sold it in 1996 to a public company called Delicious Alternative Desserts Ltd.
DAD aimed to turn the one-time family business into an ice cream empire, signing contracts with companies such as Movenpick, Cadbury and Ben & Jerry’s. It spent $11 million overhauling the production lines and increased the number of products to 90 from 12, but it never developed the volume of business needed to support its debt.
The spiral into bankruptcy ended one day in 2002 when representatives of the Royal Bank arrived and told the 70 employees to go home because the company was being turned over to a receiver. In May of that year, the operation was sold to Guelph-based Better Beef Ltd.
Kepecs was brought in as manager and within three years the company was thriving again, turning out an innovative line of products including ice cream pumped up with omega-3 fatty acids, a Disney flavour that tastes like birthday cake and cryogenically frozen ice cream balls.
To fill excess production capacity, contracts were signed with major Canadian grocery chains to produce their brands.
In 2005, Better Beef was sold to the Canadian arm of global food company Cargill Inc.
The dairy, however, was hived off in that deal and sold to Kepecs.