St. Albert’s oldest and biggest plastics manufacturer will soon have a new name now that its founding family has sold it to an American corporation.
Berry Global Group Inc., a multibillion-dollar American plastics company, announced earlier this month that it bought Pro-Western Plastics Ltd. on March 31. A May 4, 2023, Securities Exchange Commission filing on the Berry Global website listed the purchase price as $88 million USD.
Pro-Western Plastics is St. Albert’s biggest and oldest plastics manufacturer, having started operations in 1969. Its 150,000 square foot facility employs some 180 people and serves some 750 customers. It was, up until March 31, owned by the Lacroix family.
Berry Global is the largest injection moulding manufacturer in North America with some 46,000 employees in 265 locations.
In a news release, Berry Global executive vice president Jason Holsinger said this purchase would enhance Berry’s container business in North America, particularly in the dairy, industrial, and medical sectors.
“We are excited to welcome the legacy Pro-Western team to Berry and begin sharing best practices from the two companies,” he said.
Speaking June 20, Pro-Western Plastics vice-president of sales Greg Kabonik said this acquisition opened up new product lines and job opportunities for people at the St. Albert plant, some of whom had worked there for 45 years.
“It’s going to be good for us, and will grow this business,” he said.
Longtime legacy
Paul and Dave Lacroix, the former president and executive vice-president (respectively) of Pro-Western, agreed to speak with the Gazette on June 19 about their family’s decision to sell their business.
Paul said his father Don and grandfather Antoine originally ran a pulp mill in New Brunswick, but closed it in 1967. Antoine worked with associates at a Quebec plastics company called IPL to start a plastics plant in St. Albert in 1969, running it out of what was then a 36,000 square-foot facility once used to make egg cartons.
Pro-Western Plastics was the only business in what we now call the Riel Business Park at the time, Paul said. There was no Riel Drive back then, and maybe 10,000 people total in St. Albert.
“There was not even an indoor hockey arena,” Dave noted.
“And the Bruin Inn was the only place you could have a cold one (a beer),” Paul added.
Paul said Pro-Western expanded its operations five times over the years, bringing in more machinery and eventually buying out IPL. He credited their dedicated staff for the company’s success, noting that some staffers worked more than 40 years with them.
Paul said the decision to sell the company came out of a Lacroix family meeting in February 2022. Family members determined they were getting too old to run the place, and that none of their children wanted to take over. They set out to find a buyer.
“We wanted to ensure Pro Western was put in the hands of a company that would really move it forward,” Paul said, which led them to Berry Global.
While it was a hard decision, Paul said the Lacroix family was very pleased by this sale, which would ensure the future of Pro-Western and its employees.
“The future for Pro-Western is very bright,” Paul said.
Pro-Western plant manager Shannon Webb said staff members were sad to hear that the Lacroixs were moving on, as some of them had known them for decades.
“They were like family,” she said.
Webb said little has changed at the plant since the sale, apart from the removal of the Pro-Western Plastics letters off the side of the building a few weeks ago. (The new “Berry” logo is supposed to go up later this year.)
Paul and Dave said they had no firm plans on what to do now that they had stepped back from the plant, apart from working on their golf games.
