From 2012 to the end of 2013, we will concentrate on the more capital intensive phase of the plan including building scale in our facilities and investing in modern, cost-saving technology, in addition to implementing a shared services structure to reduce overhead costs.

We are seeing positive results now. In November, we completed the sale of our pork processing facility in Ontario and announced the closure of our prepared meats facility in Nova Scotia. Early in 2011 we announced the closure of a small frozen bakery in Quebec, a small bakery in the U.K. and a prepared meats plant in British Columbia. These closures allow us to aggregate volumes at other plants and reduce costs. We are on track to commission our new Ontario bakery later this year, and begin consolidating production from three smaller facilities.

We also completed the sale of our fresh sandwich business, which allows us to focus on growth in our core bakery businesses.

We are making excellent progress on the implementation of our new SAP system that will integrate our operations into one world-class systems platform. We completed 37 installations by the end of January 2011, including our corporate functions, our frozen bakery, the poultry business and the first in fresh bakery. We have a very disciplined approach to implementing SAP, designed to minimize risk through starting in our smaller operations and the non customer-facing side of our business first, allowing us to gain experience and insights from ongoing implementations. So far it’s been a winning strategy. The entire conversion is expected to be substantially complete in 2013.

“This is one of the most aggressive and successful enterprise-wide implementations of SAP we have seen for a company of the size and complexity of Maple Leaf Foods. The implementation has been planned and executed with precision and careful assessment and support of business requirements.”