Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for the invitation.
I'm Jeff Sarsfield, president of Apple Valley. We're located in Kentville, Nova Scotia. We started the business back in 2000. We're a frozen fruit pie supplier, shipping all across Canada and the U.S. We mostly concentrate on private label customers in the retail food service business. We have 68% of our sales currently in Canada and 40% in the U.S.
Last year, we grew substantially, more in Canada than in the U.S. We're up to about 400 people now operating in two production plants, both located in the same industrial park here in Kentville. We did a major expansion back in 2014-15, where we tripled our capacity at the time for both Canadian sales and exports.
In the last plant we put together, we were about 80% automated in that plant. Then due to overall growth that we've had since then, we've upgraded our original plant a fair bit. We originally planned on shutting that facility down or changing it to a totally different product line. That has provided lots of additional sales growth during the last five years.
However, this past year, our major constraint for capacity was labour. We had four production lines, and there was one complete line that we were not able to staff. Basically, with COVID, we have seen a major decline in applications from new employees. We are fortunate that we had applications from foreign workers in place. By the end of the year, we saw our first foreign workers come into our facility. We originally brought in nine foreign workers back in late December, and just last week, we had another 11 workers come in. We are able to start increasing our fourth production line, which will give us some further growth for this year.
Ending last year, we were well in excess of $100 million in sales. Our main growth is from the fact that we concentrate on providing top-quality, homestyle products. We are one of the very few North American producers that grow, process and put together apple pies from scratch.
We grow some of our own apples. We buy direct from local farmers. We peel, core and slice them in our bakery and put them directly into the pies, which gives us a unique homestyle product. That's been a big secret of our growth. We also have good local staff, who are able to train for some of the technologies that we put into our process at the two facilities.
Going forward, we still have lots of opportunities to continue our automation to help become more efficient and competitive in the marketplace.
There is one other thing. FCC and ACOA and the province helped us out when we initially started the business and were quite instrumental in us being able to start at the level we did. We have done numerous expansions over the years, and FCC and ACOA have always been there. That's been a big part of why we are still around and why we continue to grow.
I just wanted to let the committee know how important those two programs have been, along with the agri-innovate fund, which was also in there as well.
It definitely has really helped us to expand when we needed to. I guess I'll leave it at that.