A record-breaking heat spell may have helped melt away the jobs of workers at a Baskin Robbins ice cream-making plant in Peterborough.

The international ice cream chain announced Wednesday it was shutting down the Peterborough facility, its last manufacturing plant in North America, throwing 80 people out of work.

It’s not, says the company, because of a lack of demand. The plant has been operating at full capacity, supplying ice cream for the chain’s 113 stores in Canada, as well as thousands of other locations in foreign markets.

“We’ve been going 24/7 for the last couple of years,” said Pete Laport, Baskin Robbins’ vice president of global supply chain.

If anything, said Laport, the decision to shift production from Peterborough to contractors in Nova Scotia and the U.S. was sped up a bit by the warmer than usual weather. While the company has enough inventory on-hand that it can handle week-to-week bumps in demand, the steady heat in North America this summer has a lot of folks eating ice cream. That’s a change from recent years; according to a report from Euro Monitor, annual ice cream consumption in Canada fell from 9.85 to 5.50 litres per person between 2005 and 2010.

“We needed to be sure we could keep up with demand, so that pushed things along. We had to decide what to do,” said Laport, who wasn’t able to provide precise sales figures for this summer.

The Truro plant, which is also unionized, had already been making some Baskin Robbins products for the Canadian market.

The decision came as a shock to workers at the plant, said Charles Redden, president of Canadian Auto Workers local 462, which represents just over half of the employees at the plant.

“People were just totally shocked. They had no idea this was going to happen, especially because the place was going gangbusters,” said Redden. “You just hate to see people lose their jobs in a situation like this.”

The trouble for the Peterborough location, said Laport, was two-fold: Because the plant was surrounded on all sides, it couldn’t physically expand. Baskin Robbins has also been going with an “asset light” business model for roughly a decade. Translation? Let someone else do the ice cream making.

“We’re a franchising company. This decision allows us to focus more on the retail experience, said Laport. Closing the plant will cost Baskin Robbins $16 to $18 million, but the company expects to save $4 to $5 million a year by outsourcing.

Ice cream destined for Baskin Robbins’ Canadian stores will be produced at the Truro, N.S. location of Scotsburn Dairy.

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