Creek cleanup team gets a little help from their friends

A group of eight employees of SunOpta in St. Davids came out Friday afternoon to assist the Friends of One Mile Creek (FOMC) in their efforts to maintain the park at the corner of King and John Streets in the Old Town. 

Most of the members of FOMC, which formed in 2003, are owners of properties that abut the creek as it winds through Niagara. Klara Chin-Young, vice chair and project coordinator with FOMC, was pleased to have the extra help from the SunOpta team.

“We brought out the management team,” explained Erin Hagar, the human resources manager at the facility that manufactures healthy, non-GMO and organic fruit snacks for private label and co-pack applications. 

The former Niagara Natural Fruit Snack Company Inc. was acquired by SunOpta in 2015. The Four Mile Creek Road operation currently has 100 employees, said plant manager Greg Dunk.

“I’m fairly new to the team,” added Hagar, “so I wanted us to get together for a team-building activity. Our company provides a day for us to volunteer out in the community and we saw this a great opportunity to volunteer together.”

The eight managers from SunOpta worked alongside the members of the environmentally-focused FOMC to pull out weeds and remove invasive species from the area of the creek that flows through the park before pooling in Lansdowne Pond at its outlet to Lake Ontario.

“Removing these invasive plants helps the monarch butterflies and the bees,” said Hagar. “There are a lot of issues with the population of honey bees, not enough of them to pollinate all the plants. We’re a company that produces food, we rely on bees and what they do. It makes perfect sense for us.”