Food giant Heinz Wattie has been forced to stand down up to 100 staff because it is running out of cans.
The company's general manager operations, Neville Cameron, said today it was laying off two production crews for up to five weeks to give its can maker, Amcor, time to catch
up.
For the past eight weeks the Hastings cannery has worked around the clock meeting higher than usual demand for baked beans, spaghetti and soup. They used cans faster than Amcor could supply them.
Soup sales in Australia compounded the problem.
Mr Cameron said it took Amcor longer to respond to a change in demand because it had to import special can grade steel from Australia.
After the fruit season ended the cannery worked flat out on recipes. The recipe department made 100,000 tonnes of product annually.
Soup, baked beans and spaghetti, half of which went to Australia, were the three dominant lines. But the department also made lines for the Japanese market.
Mr Cameron said the company was currently finishing canning apples, the last of the seasonal crops, and generally down-sized at this time of the year.
Amalgamated Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union spokesperson Meredith Jones said the company had told it earlier in the week that it was laying off a large number of temporary workers for a period.
However, the company had not confirmed the number of people involved or specified the period, she said.
The lay-offs also affected staff in the Brite Stack department.
- HAWKE'S BAY TODAY
