# Ontario's Chicken Processing Industry: A $5.3 Billion Backbone Nobody Talks About
You probably ate chicken this week. Most Canadians did — about 35 kilograms per person per year, making it the most consumed meat protein in the country since 2004. But ask anyone to name a major Ontario industry and they'll say auto, tech, maybe mining. Almost nobody says chicken.
That's a mistake. Ontario's chicken industry generates over $5.3 billion in annual economic activity and supports nearly 29,000 jobs across the province. It runs 52 weeks a year. It doesn't lay people off when interest rates move. And it barely makes the news — which, as you'll see, is actually by design.
Here's why that matters — especially if you're thinking about where to build a career.
How Big Is Ontario's Chicken Industry, Really?
The numbers are straightforward but they tend to surprise people.
Ontario produced 477,451 tonnes of chicken in 2023 — that's roughly 477.5 million kilograms. In 2024, production ticked up another 0.6%. Nationally, Canada produced 1.4 billion kilograms of chicken that year, and Ontario accounted for about 35% of the entire country's output. Add Quebec's share and those two provinces alone handle 61% of all Canadian chicken production.
To put that in perspective: Canadian companies slaughter roughly 12 million chickens per week. The largest plants process up to 800,000 birds a week. The average facility handles about 450,000.
At the farm level, more than 1,300 family-run chicken farms operate in Ontario — out of about 2,884 regulated producers nationwide. These aren't giant corporate feedlots. Most are multi-generational family operations spread across the province.
The farm-gate value of national chicken sales hit $3.9 billion in 2024. But the real economic footprint is much bigger. When you factor in feed mills, hatcheries, farming operations, processing facilities, distribution networks, and the retail and foodservice endpoints that depend on the product, Chicken Farmers of Ontario pegs the total Ontario-specific impact at $5.3 billion. That figure comes from their meetings with Premier Ford and Ontario MPPs — this isn't something the industry is shy about when it needs to be heard.
And here's a number most people have never seen: the entire national poultry and egg sector contributes $12.2 billion to Canada's GDP, sustains 112,604 jobs, and pays roughly $4 billion in taxes. Ontario drives the largest share of that.
From Farm Gate to Loading Dock — the Processing Chain
The supply chain behind a package of chicken thighs at your grocery store is more layered than you'd think. And every layer employs people.
It starts at the feed mill — corn and soymeal turned into chicken feed. Then hatcheries supply day-old chicks to the grow operations. The farms raise broilers over a 35- to 42-day cycle. That's not a typo. A commercial broiler chicken goes from hatching to market weight in about five to six weeks. The genetics, the nutrition science, the environmental controls on modern barns — the whole system is engineered for that window.
From there, live haul operators transport birds to the processing plant. This step alone is its own logistics challenge — birds need to arrive alive, healthy, and unstressed. The holding area at the plant has strict ventilation requirements, and CFIA inspectors examine a sample from every incoming shipment before anything else happens.
At the plant is where the real density of work happens. Primary processing covers slaughter, evisceration, and chilling — all under continuous government inspection. A CFIA inspector or veterinarian is physically present on the floor during evisceration. Not on call. Present. Further processing handles the cut-up — portioning, marinating, breading, all the value-added work that turns a whole carcass into the products people actually buy. Then cold chain distribution moves boxed product to retail stores, restaurants, and institutional buyers. Temperature control from the plant floor to the loading dock to the store shelf — that's a job in itself.
The geographic concentration of this work matters. Scarborough, Brampton, Markham, the Highway 401 corridor through the GTA — this is where a significant chunk of Ontario's processing capacity sits. Proximity to the population centre and to major distribution infrastructure is the reason. You're not shipping fresh chicken from Northern Ontario to a Toronto grocery store. The plants sit close to the consumers.
Nationally, there are about 76 chicken primary processing establishments, with 39 of those federally inspected. Over 30 of Canada's federally inspected poultry and turkey plants are in Ontario and Quebec. Ontario also has 117 provincially licensed slaughter plants (all species) overseen by OMAFRA — with 16 new freestanding meat plants licensed in the 2024-25 period alone. Federally registered plants can trade interprovincially and internationally. Provincially licensed plants sell within Ontario only. Both types are subject to rigorous inspection.
The largest processors operating in the province include Maple Leaf Foods, Sofina Foods (headquartered in Markham), Cargill, Olymel, and Exceldor. Together, the top five companies control about 60% of Canada's broiler market. But smaller operations fill critical gaps — particularly in ethnic and specialty processing, regional distribution, and custom cutting for foodservice clients. A restaurant in Chinatown doesn't need the same cuts as a suburban Loblaws. That differentiation is where smaller processors earn their place.
If you want a closer look at what happens inside the plant, we break that down step by step in a separate article.
Why the Industry Barely Shows Up in the News
Here's the thing: in most industries, no news is no news. In chicken processing, no news is the whole point.
Canada is one of a handful of countries that uses supply management for poultry, dairy, and eggs. The system has been in place since 1978, when Chicken Farmers of Canada was established to coordinate national production levels. It works like this:
1. CFC directors meet every eight weeks to set the national production allocation for the next period.
2. They base that allocation on provincial demand requests, consumer consumption trends, competing meat supplies, inventory levels, and input from industry stakeholders.
3. The national total gets distributed to provincial marketing boards — in Ontario, that's CFO.
4. CFO allocates quota to individual producers on a pro-rata basis, based on the quota units each farm holds.
5. Producers must hold quota permits to market chicken to processing plants.
The allocation formula splits future growth 55/45: 55% based on provincial comparative advantage factors, 45% on historical provincial share. The Farm Products Council of Canada oversees each period. The most recent allocation period, A-192, was set at a +1% increase nationally.
What does all this mean in practice? Stable supply. Predictable pricing. No dumping. No panicked overproduction followed by mass culling. The average producer price was $2.80 per kilogram in 2024 — down 2.3% year-over-year, but nothing close to the kind of volatility you see in non-supply-managed commodities.
The system also keeps the barrier to entry high. Quota has real market value — you can easily spend over $1 million for a viable chicken farm operation in Ontario. That said, CFO runs a New Entrant Program (launched in 2012) that has welcomed 47 farm families into the industry so far. In 2024, five new entrants were accepted, each starting with a minimum of 14,000 units.
This is why you don't hear about chicken processing in crisis headlines. The system is designed to prevent crises. And it works. Boring is the goal — and boring is exactly what makes the jobs stable.
What This Means If You're Looking for Work
The Ontario chicken supply chain supports 28,950 jobs. Not all of those are on the kill floor. They're spread across farms, feed operations, hatcheries, processing plants, cold storage, transportation, quality assurance, maintenance, sanitation, and administration. The diversity of roles is something people miss. A chicken processing plant employs line workers, yes — but also mechanics, refrigeration technicians, quality assurance staff, sanitation crews, forklift operators, supervisors, and office personnel. It takes a surprisingly wide range of skills to turn a live bird into a retail-ready product.
The broader Ontario food manufacturing sector employed 116,700 people in 2023 — that's 14.4% of all manufacturing jobs in the province and 1.5% of Ontario's total workforce. Within that, about 5,200 people work specifically as industrial butchers, meat cutters, poultry preparers, and related roles (NOC 94141). The Job Bank rates employment outlook for those positions as "Good" for the 2025-2027 period.
The industry does have challenges. Labour shortages remain the biggest one — 16% of the food and beverage manufacturing workforce was over 60 in 2024. That's a wave of retirements coming, and the pipeline to replace those workers isn't filling fast enough. Job vacancies fell 31.8% from pandemic-era highs, but that's a correction back to normal, not a sign of shrinking demand. If anything, the processing bottleneck — not the number of chickens available — is what's capping growth. There are birds to process. The constraint is plant capacity and the people to run those plants.
Look, the federal and provincial governments are putting real money into this. Canada and Ontario invested up to $4.4 million under the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership specifically to support food safety and growth in Ontario's agri-food processing sector. The demand side is locked in — Canadians eat more chicken every year, and the population keeps growing.
At Cheong Hing, we've been processing chicken in Scarborough for over 30 years. We've watched this industry grow from both sides of the dock door. The operations have gotten more sophisticated — the compliance requirements are tighter, the technology is better, the food safety standards are among the strictest in the world. But the core work hasn't changed. Chickens come in. Product goes out. And the people who do that work are the reason it keeps running.
If you're looking for something that doesn't disappear when the economy hiccups, this is worth a serious look. The pay is honest, the work is consistent, and the demand curve points in one direction. The industry isn't going anywhere. It can't. People have to eat — and chicken is what they're eating.