Maple Leaf Foods will maintain and protect well-paying middle-class jobs and provide skills upgrading for the increase in automation. The new facility will create 300 immediate construction jobs and will employ 1,340 full time employees by 2023. To further strengthen the Canadian agri-food sector, Maple Leaf Foods will spend an additional $5 million in activities that accelerate the adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies and reduce their environmental footprint by 50 percent. As part of the Innovation and Skills Plan, these commitments support the Agri-Food Economic Strategy Table 's aim to scale up capacity and boost productivity by investing in innovation, increasing market access, and adopting automation and digitization. Maple Leaf will also invest more in R&D for new product development and will increase its collaboration with post-secondary institutions to identify secondary uses for inedible by-products that would otherwise be diverted to landfill.