HyLife Unveils Plans For New Office Building In Steinbach

Apr 05, 2021

HyLife has announced plans to build a brand new, head office in Steinbach.

President and Chief Executive Officer Grant Lazaruk says they are hoping to break ground during the third week in May. The four story office building will have more than 50,000 square feet of space and go up inside Steinbach's Millbrook Market. This is the new development that is taking shape behind the RCMP detachment.

"The whole concept of Millbrook Market area is a great concept, it's a great fit for us," says Lazaruk.

HyLife currently has its head office in La Broquerie. The company has more than 3,500 employees in multiple countries, with over 2,500 working in Manitoba. More than 1,500 of those are employed through HyLife's Foods division in Neepawa. The remaining 1,000 work throughout rural Manitoba in the company's Farms division.

Lazaruk says their HyLife office staff currently work out of a number of locations. He says about 188 of them will move into the new office, once complete. Lazaruk says the new head office will be large enough to host 220 employees, including HyLife's executive management team and many of its directors. HyLife will continue to use their existing head office facility in La Broquerie, though it will be repurposed.

Though their roots are in La Broquerie, Lazaruk says moving their head office to Steinbach just makes sense.

"Originally, there was a lot of employees just from La Broquerie but those employees have expanded into Steinbach, into Winnipeg and to the surrounding area," he explains. "So Steinbach is a sort of neutral location for our employees to travel to. And I think it just makes sense to invest in a building like this in Steinbach."

According to the President and CEO, discussions to build a new head office have probably been in the works the last two or three years. He notes it took a while to get to this point, because they looked at a number of different options. One of those options was the old Safeway building located on the north end of Steinbach. Lazaruk says it is not like that was a bad option.

"I don't know if there's any reasons why not," he says. "I would just think the Millbrook Market area was just a better fit for us. And it fit what we wanted to accomplish with our employees."

The new building will include a feature kitchen with an outdoor pizza oven, smoker and barbeque.

"We're a food company, so what we want to do is cater to our customers and we cater to our employees," explains Lazaruk. "So we're going to have a special space within the building that allows us to cater to customers, and allow our employees to use. It's not a restaurant."

HyLife is teaming up with Cibinel Architecture and Three Way Builders on the project. Completion is anticipated in September of 2022.

Click here to see more...

Video: Moving Ag Research Forward Through Collaboration

BY: Ashley Robinson

It may seem that public and private researchers have different goals when it comes to agricultural research. However, their different strategies can work in tandem to drive agricultural research forward. Public research may focus more on high-risk and applied research with federal or outside funding, while private sector researchers focus more on research application.

“For me, the sweet spot for public private sector research is when we identify problems and collaborate and can use that diverse perspective to address the different aspects of the challenge. Public sector researchers can work on basic science high risk solutions as tools and technologies are developed. They then can work with their private sector partners who prototype solutions,” Mitch Tuinstra, professor of plant breeding and genetics in Purdue University’s Department of Agronomy, said during the Jan. 10 episode of Seed Speaks.

Public researchers they have the flexibility to be more curiosity driven in their work and do discovery research. This is complimentary to private research, which focuses on delivering a product, explained Jed Christianson, canola product design lead for Bayer CropScience, explained during the episode.

“As a seed developer, we worry about things like new crop diseases emerging. Having strong public sector research where people can look into how a disease lifecycle cycle works, how widespread is it and what damage it causes really helps inform our product development strategies,” he added.

It’s not always easy though to develop these partnerships. For Christianson, it’s simple to call up a colleague at Bayer and start working on a research project. Working with someone outside of his company requires approvals from more people and potential contracts.

“Partnerships take time, and you always need to be careful when you're establishing those contracts. For discoveries made within the agreement, there need to be clear mechanisms for sharing credits and guidelines for anything brought into the research to be used in ways that both parties are comfortable with,” Christianson said.

Kamil Witek, group leader of 2Blades, a non-profit that works with public and private ag researchers, pointed out there can be limitations and challenges to these partnerships. While private researchers are driven by being able to make profits and stay ahead of competitors, public researchers may be focused on information sharing and making it accessible to all.

“The way we deal with this, we work in this unique dual market model. Where on one hand we work with business collaborators, with companies to deliver value to perform projects for them. And at the same time, we return the rights to our discoveries to the IP to use for the public good in developing countries,” Witek said during the episode.

At the end of the day, the focus for all researchers is to drive agricultural research forward through combining the knowledge, skills and specializations of the whole innovation chain, Witek added.

“If there's a win in it for me, and there's a win in it for my private sector colleagues in my case, because I'm on the public side, it’s very likely to succeed, because there's something in it for all of us and everyone's motivated to move forward,” Tuinstra said.