Farmscape for February 8, 2011   (Episode 3522)

The executive vice-president and chief operating officer of La Broquerie, Manitoba based Hylife, says the initial response to the company's new name has been positive.

Founded in 1994 by the Vielfaure brothers Paul, Denis and Claude and Don Janzen, Hylife has expanded from a small production operation with four thousand sows to a fully integrated company with 53 thousand sows producing 1.4 million hogs per year, it's own slaughter and processing facility, feed-mills, a vet services division and a genetic company.

Earlier this month the company officially re-branded changing its name from Hytek to Hylife.

Executive vice-president and chief operating officer Claude Vielfaure says the intent was to come up with a name that better connected the production and processing aspects of the company that was more food friendly.

Clip-Claude Vielfaure-Hylife:
We met with a marketing firm, started talking about our values of our company and how we wanted to be re-branded.

We started looking and trying to be able to tie the Hytek name into the new name.

We were able to keep the hy in Hytek and put it into Hylife.

The hy, people think of high standards, high quality standards so it fit with what we were trying to do.

The life part of the name is essentially, food is an essential part of life so it made a lot of sense to have life in the name so that's how we came up with Hylife.

Obviously Hytek as the parent company will now be Hylife.

Springhill Foods will be delayed a little bit but on April 4th Springhill will be changing to Hylife Foods so then, when we're talking about our integrated company, we'll be talking about Hylife and it will cover all of the production all the way through.

Vielfaure says, under the new name, the company will remain focused on selling high quality pork and developing strategies that will bring added value to the company.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       * Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council