Famed for its abundant fruit orchards, vineyards and beautiful natural landscapes with lakes and mountains, British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley region is also home to hundreds of smaller independent businesses specializing in production of high-quality, artisanal food products reflecting the area’s many natural charms and the entrepreneurial spirit of its inhabitants.
Located about a 15-minute drive east of Vernon, B.C., the village of Lumby is home to a number of thriving business enterprises playing a key role in the ongoing diversification of local economy, including the family-owned cheese products manufacturer Castle Cheese.
Founded by Bill Boyko in 1997, the company started out as a wholesale cheese operation in Vernon, driven by the idea of providing Canadians with high-quality and attainable cheese products on a year-round basis.
The company enjoyed several years of slow but steady growth at its original 6,000-square-foot facility in Vernon, with Bill’s son, Paul. and daughter Ashley working to keep the business growing.
By 2004, however, the company began looking for a new home after outgrowing the confines of its Vernon facility. Happily, the family did not have to look very far.
“The Village of Lumby welcomed us with opened arms in 2004 and found us a beautiful parcel of land,” recalls Castle Cheese president Paul Boyko.
“We moved into our purpose built facility in 2005 and have just celebrated 20 years here in Lumby,” says Boyko, who played and instrumental part in transforming Castle Cheese from a wholesale business into a bona fide manufacturing enterprise since assuming the company’s leadership.
Nowadays operating out of a modern 40,000-square-foot manufacturing plant employing about 50 full-time people, Castle Cheese has achieved significant success in the Canadian cheese industry circles—in large part through astute selection of promising niche market segments and continuous refinement of its manufacturing capabilities to support robust growth in those segments.
“We offer high-quality custom blends of dairy products and analog cheese at affordable prices,” Boyko told Canadian Packaging magazine in a recent interview.
“We are uniquely situated in the Canadian dairy market to help our customers keep their ever-increasing food costs in line.
“We accomplish this by crafting custom blends of cheese products with our own proprietary recipes that meet or exceed our customers’ requirements,” Boyko continues. “We sell our products from coast to coast across Canada.
“Our major customers are food-service providers who sell to restaurants, institutions and food industry processors,” Boyko says, adding that all of the company’s products are Halal-certified.
According to Boyko, the majority of the plant’s output is distributed to food-service companies across Canada in shredded, sliced, cubed and block formats.
The balance is used for the production of the company’s retail brands such as Castle Cheese, Okanagan’s Choice Cheese, Okanagan Soya Co and Pacific Coast, which can be found on the shelves of leading grocery chains like Loblaws, Save-On-Foods, Co-op and Sobeys and at most independent grocers across British Columbia.
“Our food-safety record and consistent customer satisfaction reflect our commitment to quality.”
Housing a total of six production/packaging lines, the Lumby plant is not a highly automated operation, Boyko acknowledges, “due to the nature of working with cheese.
“We need to have human employees to handle and operate cutters and run the packing machines,” he says, “as well as to box and palletize the finished products.”
As Boyko explains, one of the plant’s lines is used for blending the raw ingredients—sources from across North America—and forming them into big uniforms blocks of cheese.
The other five lines are then used to process those blocks into shreds, dices, slices or cubes that go inside the gas-flushed packages made from the high-quality barrier film supplied by FoodPak Ltd., a Richmond, B.C.-based division of Duropac specializing in flexible packaging products for food industry applications.
“FoodPak is one of our key packaging partners,” Boyko states.
“They supply all our packaging needs and work with us to help deliver film and supplies in a timely and cost-effective manner.
“They even go above and beyond for us by storing film in one of their warehouses in B.C., as we are always tight for space.”
As Boyko asserts, “Because we primarily sell to the foodservice market, packaging integrity and production efficiency plays the biggest role in our success as we move forward into the future.”
As part of the company’s continuous efforts to secure a prosperous future for Castle Cheese products, the company has in recent years built a strong relationship and rapport with Reiser (Canada) Ltd., a leading supplier of food-processing and packaging equipment headquartered in Burlington, Ont., with a big presence in British Columbia.
“We attribute a lot of our success to working with key partners such as Reiser,” sates Boyko.
“They have helped us diversify our products and packaging ranges to keep up with other larger and more diverse competitors, such as allowing us to offer new and improved packaging or diversifying our cubed and dice lines of cheese.”
As Boyko relates, much of this diversification and packaging enhancement can be attributed directly to the purchase and installation of three state-of-the-art VARIOVAC Optimus vacuum-packing machines purchased from Reiser over the last few years.
“We first met the team at Reiser at the PACK EXPO Las Vegas show in 2018 after seeing their advertisement in Canadian Packaging magazine,” Boyko recalls, “and we had a great experience working with Reiser on the purchase of our first VARIOVAC.
“It was so much better than our old packaging machines!
“We found we had much less downtime due to fast die changes and film changes,” he continues, “with little of and little to no loss of time due to errors in packaging.
“Moreover, the whole team at Reiser was very professional,” Boyko adds, “from Alessandro Sestini [B.C. sales rep] working with me on the purchasing end to Eric Deschamps [technician] on the installing side, with his vast knowledge of the machinery.
“We enjoyed the process so much that we budgeted over the next two years to replace all outdated and aging packaging machines to VARIOVAC Optimus,” Boyko extols, “and so we now have three of them.
“From what I hear, there are not very many food manufacturers in Canada to have three VARIOVAC Optimus machines in operation,” says Boyko, “and we could not be happier about having them at our Lumby facility.”
In fact, the positive experience that Castle Cheese has enjoyed through its partnership with Reiser so far also prompted the company to purchase another piece of equipment from Reiser earlier this year—the Holac Cubixx 100 dicer—to improve the consistency and uniformity of its cubed cheese products.
“It’s a beautiful machine that operates really efficiently, is easy to clean, and has made our diced cheese far more consistent in terms of the cubing structure.
“The machine is actually a gamechanger for us,” he enthuses, “providing a nice perfect cube every time, so that we have a perfect finished product for our customers in every pack.
“We had also, years prior, purchased a Vemag cheese block former from Reiser, which we use for extruding some of our cheese products into bricks,” Boyko adds, “and it also works really well for us.”
Designed as an all-purpose machine for cost-effective and automatic packaging for food products, the VARIOVAC Optimus is engineered to provide exceptional vacuum, MAP (modified atmosphere packaging), skin and shrink packaging, and hot-filling performance through many cutting-edge performance features.
The deep-drawing machines are equipped with the proprietary VARIOVAC RapidAirSystem that guarantees optimum formation of the packaging and a high packaging output, reaching speeds of up to 12 cycles per minute for shallow vacuum-packs, with superior film distribution in the corners and precise forming of the package.
Boasting all-stainless-steel construction, the washdown-compatible machine features almost no plastic parts, with all the colour-coded tubing housed in a designated frame inside machine, with easy access for cleaning.
Featuring easy three-button operation (start, stop, reset) and an E-stop, the compact three-meter machine is controlled via a full-colour 10-inch touchscreen HMI (human-machine interface) for fully flexible programmability, recipe management storage and optional remote diagnostics.
“These machines filled our needs in all the areas that we wanted insofar as higher speeds, a wide array of pocket formations, and the ease-of-use.
“The side panels of the machine easily come apart so that we can access all the internal components,” he continues, “and because most of the parts are not proprietary, we can easily order them right off-the-shelf, should the need occur.
“We really enjoy how efficient, fast and reliable these machines are,” Boyko says.
“After we saw how well our first VARIOVAC worked for us, we knew that we could safely invest our money into more of these machines.”
Castle Cheese production manager Michael Moore fully concurs, lauding the VARIOVAC machines’ user-friendly operation.
“The interactive display panel (HMI) is very simple and intuitive for our people to control the running speed,” he says, “and it displays all the key parts of the machine right on the screen with a simple touch of the icon.
“It also allows us to store up to 100 different recipes,” Moore points out.
“We currently have 19 pre-programmed recipes,” Moore notes, “and it’s very easy to switch over from one to another: very simple and straightforward.”
Boyko adds that he is fond of the exceptionally quick product and die changeovers enabled by the VARIOVAC Optimus machines.
“We often need to change the pockets two to three times a day to package different items,” he notes, “and it can all be done within 10-to-15 minutes with very little use of any tools.”
Adds Boyko: “What we also really like about Reiser’s VARIOVACs is their reliability, so that when we turn them on in the morning, they’re going to be ready to run all day, without the worry of potential downtime or sensor issues.
“There is also a big advantage in having your processing and packaging machinery coming from one supplier,” Boyko states, “because you only have to make one phone call to get new parts or to have a service technician come over.”
Says Boyko: “We find the Canadian dairy sector to be a highly competitive industry with many strong and innovative competitors, and we attribute a lot of our success to working with key partners such as Reiser.
“We have noticed a lot of new interest in customers looking for Canadian-made products in the last six months,” Boyko notes.
“With the threat of potential tariffs and boycott of many American-made products, we are definitely seeing an uptick the in sales of our products made here in Canada,” he reveals.
“I have had many new customers make the effort to reach out to us looking to move from ordering similar products from the U.S. to our products, made here in Canada.”
As Boyko sums up, “We plan to keep moving forward, diversifying, and continuing to grow to meet customer demands.
“And we’re looking forward to partnering with Reiser again in the future to help us meet those goals.
