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Your LOCAL Media since 1918! VOLUME 108: ISSUE 04
www.tofieldmerc.com
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
K9 Choice expansion to provide more local jobs
Kari Janzen Staff Reporter
K9 Choice Foods in Tofield has partnered with new owners, Actual Pet Foods, and have broken ground for their 8,705 square foot expansion. “It's a great opportunity for everybody. We are breaking ground on our new building and right now we're demolishing all the old buildings,” General Manager Deb Reay said. Chief Operating Officer Trevor Wojick said they have roughly an eight-month project to expand the facility by the 8700 SQFT. “It’s about a $2.7 million investment with the renovations on the old building, to completely revamp the building,” Mark Montpetit, founder of K9
Choice Foods said. “The goal is to be SQF (Safe Quality Food) and HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) certified for food and safety. We're looking to build a state-of-the-art pet food manufacturing facility. We have some examples to follow; part of our new group is Iron Will in Ontario, and in their facility you can pretty much eat off of the floor. It is absolutely amazing and we're going to be modeling after that.” Part of the expansion includes a 3,000 SQFT, 20-foot-high freezer, which Montpetit said is about 10 times the amount of space they currently have. With more space to store products, Reay said that they will be able to run more shifts, which will provide more jobs for Tofield.
“Ninety per cent of the people that work here are local to Tofield,” Reay said. “Depending upon the time of year, we have between 30 and 40 employees but we're looking to drastically expand that as well,” Montpetit said. “I would guess that in the near future we'll expand that number between 50 and 60. Within the next two years, it could be double what we're doing right now, in that 70 to 80 range, because we could run two, maybe three shifts. Once we have the freezer space, we'll be able to run 24 hours a day.” Montpetit said that most of their sales are in western Canada right now, but the east is largely an untapped market at this point. “The brand is already national, but
about 85 per cent of our sales is in western Canada. Eastern Canada is actually the largest market in Canada, and we haven't capitalized on that yet. We have a lot of growth here available to us in Canada. We've partnered with an exceptional team of other manufacturers, and we've got a big focus on food safety and marketing and making a better consumer experience, and that all starts with having the proper facility,” he said. Montpetit said the expansion has been on their radar for over two years and they spent a lot of time deciding when and where they would like to expand. “There's been a lot of options that have been explored for a while now. We've been going down this road for about two years but we like the town; Continued on Page 7