Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu is home to a flexible-packaging manufacturer founded in 1954 that now runs two plants in the city and employs more than 950 people, shipping packaging materials to food and consumer-goods brands worldwide from a network spanning six countries. That packaging-manufacturing base drives real demand for food packaging equipment locally: a second packaging company, more than 40 years old, thermoforms recyclable trays for mushrooms, fresh herbs, frozen foods, and biscuits, and doubled its plant footprint in a $10-million expansion completed in 2019 before adding another facility in 2021. A poultry and pork processor also expanded here in 2017, adding cooked, deboned chicken production for foodservice customers, but that plant closed for good in July 2025, cutting 135 jobs, a real loss to the city's food-processing base even as its packaging manufacturers keep running. An industrial park served by a provincial highway and rail lines still hosts more than 100 manufacturing companies in the city.

A co-packer or private-label producer working alongside Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu's packaging plants needs equipment that keeps pace with a flexible-packaging supplier down the road. We build Mars Series VFFS baggers that form, fill, and seal pouches at that speed, and our case-packing lines take over the cartoning before palletizing and outbound freight. A producer running film sourced from that supplier can match its bagging speed to the volume the packaging plant already ships, rather than running a line sized for a smaller operation. One packaging-automation case study documents a food producer scaling case-packing capacity to match rising order volume, a throughput problem any growing co-packer in this industrial park is likely to hit as its own orders increase. Our broader equipment lineup gives a Montérégie-area producer a path to add packaging automation without waiting on a custom-engineered line.