Oxford Frozen Foods

Matthew Bragg is a senior manager at Nova Scotia’s Oxford Frozen Foods, the world’s largest supplier of frozen wild blueberries. He has early memories of travelling through wild blueberry fields with his father, John, who founded the company in 1968. “I have a three-year-old son and when we go for a drive we go look at blueberry fields,” Bragg says. “I did with my father and my father did with his grandfather. That’s just kind of a family tradition.”

Another tradition is the family farm, headquartered in Collingwood Corner, the community where the Braggs have lived for seven generations. The farm is part of a family-owned network of more than 10,000 hectares of wild blueberry fields, and that number is growing. In addition to harvesting their own fields, Oxford Frozen Foods relies on local farmer-suppliers to meet an increasing demand for a product with health benefits that have been widely recognized. “We’re farmers first and by far the most important relationship we have is with our own local farmers,” Bragg says. “We wouldn’t have a business without our customers, but obviously we wouldn’t have a business without our suppliers, either….we cherish the relationship we have with our farmer-suppliers.”

The company’s head office is situated in Oxford, the wild blueberry capital of Canada. Oxford Frozen Foods markets roughly 50 per cent of the North American wild blueberry industry. Its key customers are jam, yogurt and cereal companies. “We say we’re an ingredient supplier,” Bragg says. “It’s one of the best ingredients in the world if you’re running a manufacturing business. There’s no pit, you don’t have to peel it, you just eat it exactly the way it is, and it is quite honestly one of the healthiest things in the world you could eat.”

The Bragg family owns seven processing factories. Four are in Nova Scotia, one in New Brunswick and two in Maine. In peak season, the company can employ as many as two thousand people. In Oxford, there are more than four hundred full-time employees. “At Oxford Frozen Foods we have a lot of highly-skilled, dedicated, long-term employees,” Bragg says. “You would not be able to be successful in any business without highly-skilled employees. You just couldn’t do it.” Oxford Frozen Foods has succeeded in making its mark worldwide. In addition to the United States, large markets include Japan, Great Britain, Germany and France. The company was the first to sell the North American wild blueberry in Japan.

“Japan is now a very, very significant export market, one of the biggest markets for North American wild blueberries, so the whole industry has benefited from that,” Bragg says. Oxford Frozen Foods’ international customers also include Taiwan, Scandinavia, Italy, Holland, Switzerland and Australia. A priority at the business is developing new markets, and Bragg says they hope to make inroads in China, India and Indonesia. It’s not surprising that he describes exporting as “the engine of our growth.” Continued growth demands a focus on innovation. “I would say there are technological innovations that are happening every day in the manufacturing world and you have to stay on top of anything that would improve the quality of our products and lower the cost of our products, to compete in the world.” Bragg says every day, managers and supervisors focus on thinking of better ways to do things at Oxford Frozen Foods. “It’s innovation by employees, it’s innovation in operations, in how we do things, when we do things. And a lot of that involves technology, computer controls, electronic sorting equipment for the quality of the blueberries and just automating parts of the operation that are difficult to do manually and expensive to do manually.”

Resourcefulness is also important. Along with an expanding presence in the international marketplace, comes the need to continually develop farm practices to increase the crop. When unable to secure sufficient numbers of honey bees to pollinate their Nova Scotia crops, the Bragg family developed its own apiary. Over the last ten years, the apiary has grown to 10,000 hives. While wild blueberries are its primary focus, Oxford Frozen Foods is one of North America’s largest processors of frozen carrots. In addition, they have a line of appetizers which includes onion rings and battered cauliflower, mushrooms, zucchini, peppers, and cheese products. Like many other producers, Oxford Frozen Foods uses the IQF individually quick frozen process for its fruit and vegetables.

Using blueberries as an example, Bragg explains that the fruit is put through a freezing tunnel called a belt freezer. Air blows up through the blueberries and they bounce around and freeze individually. “If you picture making a muffin in a factory situation, they want to be able to get the pieces, the blueberries, separate.” There’s no question that the wild blueberry – the provincial berry – has yielded great commercial success for Oxford Frozen Foods. And the future looks bright.

“If we look back five years and we think where we are going to be in the next five years, we continuously underestimate how rapidly the company is going to grow and how rapidly the industry is going to grow.” Bragg says. “We just continue to plug along, continue to grow markets, develop new markets.” And they do it from their Nova Scotia home base, where they connect to the world. “The harbour in Halifax is a big advantage for us. We’re very close to it, we ship to Asia and ship to Europe out of the Halifax Harbour,” Bragg says. When asked about the lifestyle advantages of being based in Nova Scotia, Bragg lists, among other considerations, education, health care, safety, security and the province’s natural beauty. “It’s defintely beneficial an internationally-based company or a company who has international customers to be in Nova Scotia. You don’t feel like you’re cut off from the rest of the world. The world is shrinking every day, and if you’re going to pick somewhere to raise your family and invest money and hire people, I honestly think Nova Scotia’s perfect.”