By IAN ROSS
An international supplier of lottery tickets is slated to build its fifth printing factory in Sault Ste. Marie.
Winnipeg-based Pollard Banknote was selected as the successful bidder last fall by the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) to establish a ticket finishing facility.
The new 20,000-square-foot ticket finishing plant will bring more than 60 jobs to the city and generate a local payroll of nearly $2 million per year.
The 10-year contract worth $130 million has options to extend it for an additional five years.
Pollard has already been a lottery product supplier to OLG for 20 years.
The 100-year-old family-owned company is considered a world leader in the production of instant scratch pouched games.
The company specializes in scratch-off and break open lottery tickets with most of their business for government lotteries.
Under the contract, Pollard would provide a range of products such as scratch-off tickets, marketing strategies, game promotional support, market analysis and product research and development services.
The official contract, which was slated to be signed last December, was not finalized this spring, but company co-chief executive officer John Pollard expressed no worries about the plant moving forward.
“Nothing is really changed since the fall press release,” says Pollard, whose great-grandfather Oliver Pollard, founded the company in 1907 as a general commercial printer.
“For various reasons that contract has taken us longer to finalize this (but) it’s expected to be done shortly,” says Pollard. “There’s no real problems or particular reasons for the delays that are ominous, but sometimes it takes longer than we thought.”
Pollard Banknote was the successful bidder in an OLG procurement process.
The plant will convert rolls of printed tickets for instant-win lotteries such as Keno and Instant Crosswords into finished books of tickets to distribute for sale across Ontario. The process will include a packaging and inspection lines along with short-term warehousing.
Pollard expects no major changes stemming from last fall’s announcement and expects to establish the finishing facility as soon as the contract is signed.
The Sault is already host to a provincial charity casino run by OLG as well as their corporate headquarters employing 535 people.
The Winnipeg company caters to 45 lotteries worldwide with four ticket producing facilities in Kamloops, B.C.; Barrhead, AB.; Ypsilanti, Mich.; Council Bluffs, Iowa; and a sales office in Kuala Lumpur. The company producer 13 billion instant tickets annually and four billion pull tabs.
Although the company has become a publicly traded firm, the Pollard family holds a majority ownership position.
Three members of the Pollard family occupy senior management positions including Chairman Lawrence Pollard, who has remained in the company since 1947.
