By A.D. Frat
The story of Leamington, Ontario, and its relationship with corporate giants like Kraft Heinz and Berkshire Hathaway is a stark illustration of capitalist exploitation, worker disempowerment, and the myth of corporate benevolence. What began as a tale of community resilience has been co-opted into a narrative celebrating corporate saviors – a narrative that obscures the systemic erosion of workers’ rights, wage suppression, and the hollowing out of a town’s economic sovereignty.
The fall of Heinz
In 2013, Heinz – freshly acquired by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and the austerity-driven private equity firm 3G Capital – shuttered its 100-year-old factory Leamington plant, axing 740 jobs. The closure devastated a town where “EVERYONE relied on Heinz,” as residents lamented on social media. Farmers, truckers and small businesses faced ruin. Yet, as Buffett coldly rationalized, it was merely a matter of shifting production to “more profitable plants,” a capitalist calculus that sacrifices communities for shareholder returns.
Like many Canadian towns that were centred on – and sometimes even erected as company towns for the purpose of – servicing 19th century industrialists (Ford’s Ford City, Hiram Walker’s Walkerville, or even Timmins to service Hollinger Mines now owned by Lord Baron Conrad Black), Leamington’s economy was anchored by the establishment of Heinz when it was built in 1909.
Heinz’s exit was not an anomaly, but the culmination of decades of corporate strong-arming. In 1994, the company threatened to fire 450 workers during union negotiations, forcing concessions. By 2009, Heinz celebrated 100 years in Leamington with production cuts and redirecting work to US plants, foreshadowing the 2013 closure.
And during these struggles, where were the elected officials for the vast majority of Canadians being affected by this crisis? Kathleen Wynne, then Ontario’s Liberal Premier and Agriculture Minister, had absolutely nothing to say even though she had the most power to change circumstances. Former Conservative Prime Minister Harper wasn’t mentioned in any articles.
The message was clear: workers’ livelihoods were expendable in pursuit of profit, and big business party officials facilitated it. Pushback need not be applied.
Highbury Canco: a wolf in saviour’s clothing
Enter Highbury Canco in 2014 – a “consortium of investors” lauded as Leamington’s salvation. Who does this consortium of investors include? Sam Diab (CEO of Highbury and former factory manager when the plant was owned by Heinz), Pradeep Sood (a Toronto businessperson and financier) and Surjit Babra (who made his millions in the military-industrial complex).
Promising jobs and growth, the plant’s workforce expanded to 800 seasonal and 650 full-time employees by 2023, nearing Heinz’s pre-closure numbers. But what good are these jobs if you can’t even afford to live off them? Diab, Sood and Babra continue to make their fortunes as intermediaries serving the larger capitalists of Warren and Co.
It’s a perfect example of the type of “growth” that is created in our era of neoliberal capitalism, an expansion of parasitic middlemen while workers get depravity.
Chief union steward John Scott Jackson highlighted the indignity of poverty wages in a town where living costs rise unabated. On the other hand, Mayor Hilda MacDonald praised the “fabulous news” while ignoring the grim reality: 70 percent of Highbury workers earn less than $19 per hour, wages that trap families in precarity, and a wage increase of just $3 in nearly a decade. In the same period, inflation has skyrocketed 24.5 percent from 2014 to 2023 when the latest contract was negotiated, effectively instituting a 5.75-percent erosion of wages.
Article after article has framed Highbury as a “success,” but the truth lies in the stalled union negotiations and management’s silence. UFCW Local 175 reported being “at a standstill” for weeks, with no meetings scheduled. Sam Diab proclaimed he was “very pleased” with the contract results. Meanwhile, Highbury’s automation and co-packing deals for anonymous “large food and beverage companies” prioritize profit over worker dignity, embedding instability into the jobs that remain.
But let’s dig deeper into what brands are being co-packed at Highbury. Insiders have told People’s Voice that common brands produced include: Classico tomato and pesto sauce, Dairy Queen, Heinz beans, HP sauce, A1 sauce, Tostitos salsa and queso, Lays French onion and ranch, Taco Bell dips, Kettle Creek BBQ sauce, Heinz tomato juice and paste, Heinz chili sauce, Heinz canned pastas, Tim Hortons soup, Great Value salsa, Heinz vinegar, and Catelli pasta sauce. Some previously made products include Momofuku, Food Network branded sauces, Kraft Indulgence, and Heinz baby cereal.
The small list provided shows an overwhelming amount of Kraft Heinz products – one of several co-pack arrangements as Buffet and 3G shift production from inhouse to out in an attempt to reduce costs.
Though it may seem that Highbury Canco is an independent player, they are very much dependent on their larger, wealthier capitalist patrons. They play an important intermediary role, and rewarded for their “services” which include wage suppression, job elimination, workload increases, etc. All this to benefit and enrich a minority class of the very wealthy instead of the people of Leamington or wider Canadian society.
This is a very prominent strategy in the private equity world, outsourcing production to smaller capitalists. The entire role of this sector of the finance industry is to “find efficiencies” in how corporations are run. But that’s just fanciful wordplay to describe reorganizing production to break Canadian workers’ gains, no different than the offshoring of automotive production overseas to instill precarity, instability and fear of job loss into workers. They’re all profitable endeavours for our titans of industry.
Corporate welfare vs. workers’ struggle
Leamington’s municipal government fast-tracked Highbury’s takeover by slashing the plant’s property valuation from $20 million to under $10 million – a gift of tax breaks that starves public coffers. In fact, it’s similar to how the plant was first established. As mentioned in Leamington’s history section of their website, “The community offered free water, free gas, exemption from taxation, fire protection, and in some cases a free building site (to seek new industry). Their enterprising thinking was rewarded in 1908 when the H.J. Heinz Company decided to locate in Leamington.”
This corporate welfare contrasts sharply with workers’ struggles. Kraft Heinz, post-merger, boasted $1.5 billion in annual “cost cuts” (read: layoffs and wage suppression) by 2017.
The 2023 revelation that Kraft Heinz generated $48,000 in profit per employee – extracted from a shrinking workforce of 36,000, down from 42,000 in 2015 – underscores the grotesque inequality of modern capitalism. Workers, deemed “a vital part of our business” by Highbury’s Sam Diab only when compliant, are discarded the moment they demand fair treatment and pay.
The myth of corporate benevolence
Documentaries and media from the corporate press have mythologized Heinz and Highbury as Leamington’s “saviours,” erasing worker agency and the role that differing capitalists have on this story. When townspeople pushed back and attempted to make Buffet pay for what they did to this proud Canadian town, a boycott was declared and gained popularity.
But soon co-option in the form of French’s Ketchup – hailed as a “white knight” – exploited the town’s plight for marketing while the real heroes, the workers and unions fighting for dignity, were sidelined.
Highbury Canco got paid, Kraft Heinz got paid, Berkshire Hathaway got paid, 3G capital got paid: the capitalists are benefiting from the destruction of their own creation.
What do worker’s get? Their wages cut by nearly half, worse working conditions, increased workloads, and disrespect. This narrative, as Michael Parenti noted, reflects how ruling classes act in concert without conspiracy: corporations and politicians alike benefit from framing exploitation as “progress.”
This specific concert was orchestrated by Diab, Sood, Babra, Warren, Munger and Schwartz with the help of politicians like Harper, Ford, Trudeau, Wynne and Co.
You don’t need a PhD from Yale to see that the rich are at odds with the working class, when Warren Buffet himself exclaimed, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Conclusion: solidarity over subjugation
Leamington’s story is not one of corporate rescue, but of resilience against systemic predation. The fight for living wages, stable jobs and union rights continues, even as Highbury dangles the carrot of 100 new hires – a pittance compared to the wealth extracted from workers’ labour.
Though not easy, the path forward demands solidarity. Workers must reject the false choice between corporate domination and economic collapse, building power through collective action. Leamington’s future – and that of people Canadian as a whole, in light of the recent tariff war – hinges not on the “benevolence” of investors like Buffett or 3G Capital or a “consortium” of vultures like the 3-musketeers, but on the courage of its people to demand a world where labour is valued over profit. Or, if we dared, for workers to own these factories.
The class war is ongoing – and it’s time for workers to win it.
This article is the first of a two-part series exposing the work atmosphere of Highbury Canco
[Photo: Ontario Federation of Labour]
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