A Manitoba family-owned food processing company is receiving $250,000 in government funding for equipment upgrades.

Spenst Brothers Premium Meats of Winkler, which produces and sells products like pizza, deli meats, and perogies, is purchasing new equipment to meet consumer demand and food safety requirements. This includes things like packaging systems and conveyors.

"[Our ladies] make a lot of pizza crusts every week, and if we can get some of the repetitive tasks to be easier for them, that's what we want to do," says general manager Paul Spenst. "So, we need to get a dough rounder, and if we can put that thing to use and make it work the way it's supposed to, it's going to save the ladies so much sweat work."

Right now, Spenst Bros. sells pizza in 50 stores across southern Manitoba. Paul Spenst says they'd love to expand further, but at their current store, they just can't make any more pizza.

"When we first opened this business in 2003, I think the first week we sold 30 pizzas. Now I guess we're close to 2,000 a week. It's just way beyond what we thought we could do," he says. "We'd love to be able to offer our product across Manitoba, and then of course that leads to the question, how much farther do we want to go? Do we want to go across Canada? I'd love to predict that's what's going to happen, but we've always felt as a family, we need to make great product and serve well locally before we bother talking about federally."

With that focus on local, Spenst Bros. employs 18 full-time staff and currently buys about $345,000 of ingredients from within Manitoba. Their expansion is planned to cost $2.3 million, with more than $1 million going toward new equipment.

Manitoba Agriculture, Food, and Rural Development Minister Ron Kostyshyn says value-added food processing, like Spenst Bros., is important to the province.

"Employment opportunities continue to grow, and once you have people who are employed in various businesses, whether it's Spenst or Parmalat (in Winnipeg), it just contributes to the provincial economy, it also serves the agriculture component," he says, "so let's take the product that's locally grown here by the producers, the hard-working farmers, and put it into a processing industry."

The government of Manitoba aims to create a $5.5 billion dollar food-processing industry by 2022.