Lots of sticks

Once up and running, Global Sticks Inc. hopes to produce 6 billion sticks per year from its Thunder Bay plant.

A year behind their original schedule, Global Sticks president Reggie Nukovic said it will be another six to eight weeks until they officially start operations.

“We’re getting very close to starting production; we’re testing equipment. We’re running some of our lines,” he said Tuesday at the Arthur Street plant.

Global Sticks manufactures wooden novelty sticks for ice cream and corndog manufacturers in plants in China and Europe and chose Thunder Bay for their latest facility because of the area’s white birch supply.

The reasons for the delay at the local site are due to government requirements concerning engineering that Nukovic said they weren’t prepared for. It has also been a constant financial fight, he added.

“We have a bunch of good partners but it takes a little time to put money together and to build a factory in North America when the financial crisis was upon us,” he said.

With tougher safety laws in Canada than their overseas plants, vice-president Hans-Erik Aamand says they are still working on some of the machinery and they had to make many adjustments.

“Of course as a company, we have to apply that and we will do it,” he said.

Aamand noted that although their top producing plant in Europe makes about 11 billion sticks per year, Thunder Bay has the potential to do the same. And although the city was picked for its birch supply, company officials are now questioning if there is enough to fulfill their long-term goals.

“We feel there is enough birch to get us going,” said Nukovic. “Our long-term plans and where we want to be a number of years from now are probably now coming into our business model that there might not be enough birch – at the level we think we want to be in the future.”

Aamand said they have altered their expectations and found ways to reduce their consumption of wood for each million sticks they produce.

“There is still something to work with,” he said. “We have to optimize our production maybe sooner than we expected and we will get it.”

The Thunder Bay facility currently employs about 120 people; ninety-nine per cent of the workforce was hired locally, Nukovic noted, adding when running at full capacity, there could be as many as 170 employees.

“We are very positive on the outlook of Global Sticks,” he said. “We’ve been in the stick business for close to two or three decades and we have a lot of things going our way.”

A grand opening ceremony is expected in May.