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| Ontario made pickles under attack. |
I'm angry. I don't always think coherently when I am angry and this morning I am angry.
Some time ago I wrote a piece on Made in India Pickles. It is my most popular post, with more than 26,000 hits. I have learned that people all over North America have noticed the changes occurring in the pickle business.
Small producers are swallowed by food industry giants, who then have a hiccup. Think of Bick's Pickles. Started by a Scarborough, Ontario, farm couple in the mid 1940s, the family-run business grew into a well-respected nationwide pickle producer selling 12 million jars annually with 33 varieties by 1960.
In 1966, the Bick family sold their business to Robin Hood Canada. The flour company was expanding beyond baking products and into other food categories.
After a series of acquisitions and restructurings, the company become the International Multifoods Corporation in 1970. In 2004, The J.M. Smucker Company acquired International Multifoods and took control of its entire line. Near the end of 2011, all Canadian production ended and was moved to the U.S. Canada lost 150 factory jobs plus hundreds of farm jobs.
Which brings us to today. In early 2024, the J.M. Smucker Co. sold the Bick's pickle brand, along with a number of other condiment brands, to Treehouse Foods. The price for the entire lot? $20 Million USD. This half the estimated value of the Bick's brand alone at the time of the Smucker purchase.
Today Bick's pickles are caught in the middle of the Donald Trump tariff wars. Canada has slapped a 25 per cent Canadian retaliatory tariff
on the product. With grocery stores removing Bick's from their shelves, Bick's pickles are now too expensive for most Canadian consumers. The brand is in danger of disappearing.
It seems odd but Treehouse Foods used approximately 11 million pounds of Ontario-grown cucumbers and a lot of Canadian-made jar lids for its product. If the Bick's brand disappears, will this mean an overall loss of more Canadian jobs? It is hard to say. As sales of American-make Bick's fall, sales of Canadian-made pickles, like Lakeside and Marty's, are growing. But Bick's is not the only Canadian pickle to leave Canada. Once a market leader, the Strub's pickle brand is now bottled in India. Strub's, once based in Brantford, Ontario, closed and the name and recipes were acquired by Whyte's out of Quebec. After Whyte's failed, Quebec-based Aliments Putter's Inc. purchased the physical assets of Whyte’s
Foods Inc. in March 2024.
Aliments Putter's uses the former Whyte's production facilities in Quebec to make their own brands, Putter's and Moishe's. They sold the Strub's name to Condiment House, which is owned by Clubhouse/McCormick Canada. Condiment House does not make pickles. They farm out the production, mainly to India. They are not alone. Some store brands now import their pickles from India.
If you check my work, you will come across references to Foodfest International 2000 Inc. which acted as the interim owner that transitioned Strub's from a family-run business toward its eventual acquisition by Whyte's Foods. Foodfest
attempted to leverage the Strub's name into
other categories, such as smoked salmon and hummus. These attempts failed as did Foodfest International 2000 itself, which closed leaving many Ontario cucumber farmers unpaid.
