KEEPING THEIR HEADS UP

摘要

Rougemont, Que. - There's an inside joke among the jocular core of youthful executives who run A. Lassonde Inc., Canada's second-largest maker of fruit juices and drinks, that they play in the NJL - the National Juice League. "The competition is really tough," says company president Jean Gattuso. "We like to say that if we don't want to lose -and that's what we fear - we have to jump on the ice and play hard every day, 365 days a year." As metaphors go, Don Cherry would call that a beauty, eh? Like small-market Canadian teams in the locked-out National Hockey League, rural Quebec-based Lassonde is competing against the biggest and best companies the North American juice industry has to offer. Still, it manages to hold its own - and then some. One measure is the fact that, with more than $250 million in annual sales and some 750 employees working at a half-dozen processing and packaging facilities in Quebec, Ontario and Nova Scotia, Lassonde is the number-one producer and distributor of pure fruit juices and drinks in Eastern Canada.