Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - May 8, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba B5 THURSDAY MAY 8, 2025 ● BUSINESS@FREEPRESS.MB.CA ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM BUSINESS Steinbach refill centre Milieu Market seeks Winnipeg presence OVER the past year, Milieu Market has shifted its expansion plan away from the United States and adjusted its messaging to accommodate a “tradwife” trend. Its latest focus: finding a Winnipeg storefront. “We are pretty passionate about bringing refilleries to … communities that don’t have options,” said Jules Plett, Milieu Market founder. Winnipeg has a new gap. Planet Pan- try dispensed soaps and detergents into customer-brought containers over the past four years; however, the low-waste company closed its Johnston Terminal location at The Forks last week. Milieu Market, which has a similar business based on home essentials to health and hygiene products, bought Planet Pantry’s remaining stock and hopes to attract its customer base. It’s eyeing St. Boniface and Wolse- ley as storefront potentials. For now, it’ll truck its goods into Winnipeg each Sunday, offering curbside delivery to clients who book appointments online. Plett began Milieu Market in Stein- bach four years ago. She found herself parked in the city, near family, as a re- sult of the COVID-19 pandemic. Previ- ously, she’d travelled North America in her camper van. The landscape photog- rapher spent many days in forests and national parks. “You don’t really have a place to put all your garbage,” Plett said. “It be- came very apparent how much waste I was going through.” She made an effort to live more sus- tainably, Plett said, which included re- filling household cleaners at specialty stores. Those stores weren’t available when she moved to Steinbach. So in 2021, she launched Milieu Market in a trailer. Later that year, she swapped the trail- er for a brick-and-mortar shop in the southeast Manitoba city. A second location in Altona Mall and an in-house brand, Greenland and Co., have since been added to Milieu Mar- ket. “It’s definitely popular,” said Henry Suderman, property manager of the Al- tona shopping centre. Milieu Market attracts a specific crowd — often, patrons are health-con- scious, he said. The company’s primary messaging has always highlighted sustainability. Its website advertises “4 Rs” — reduce, reuse, recycle and refill. The mission remains, Plett said, adding, “There has been a huge shift for shopping natural with the tradwife trend. We’re catering towards that.” Women participating in the “trad- wife” lifestyle, as it’s termed online, focus on homemaking and their version of 1950s gender roles. Plett has noticed a general shift in consumers’ focus: Milieu Market pa- trons are concerned about how prod- ucts affect their bodies, rather than how items affect the planet. She’s tracked declining demand among her customers for vegan items and an increase for animal-derived products, like beef tallow. Made from rendered fat, it’s surged in popularity online as a moisturizer or soap. “Sustainability and natural go hand in hand,” Plett stated. “Whether or not they care about the sustainable aspect, what they’re doing is helping the planet.” Often, people on opposite sides of the political spectrum care about the same issues — they’re just framed different- ly, said Sean Buchanan, a University of Manitoba business professor. The desire for “natural” products re- call a homesteader movement, where individuals leave cities and go off-grid, caring for their own animals and grow- ing their own produce, he said. “This is what I almost see the trend becoming,” Buchanan said, adding homesteaders’ political ideologies vary. Refill stations like Milieu Market would create a bigger environmental impact if done at a mass scale. For ex- ample, if grocery stores had such set- ups for their liquid products, Buchanan said. Milieu Market is doing “the right kind of thing,” he added. Driving to a refill station versus walking to a grocery store for non-re- usable products is also a consideration, he said. Milieu Market seeks a roughly 1,000-square-foot shop in Winnipeg. It inquired at Johnston Terminal, the for- mer home of Planet Pantry. Despite sev- eral empty storefronts, only one space wasn’t leased at the time; it wasn’t suit- able for Milieu Market, Plett said. A new tenant will take Planet Pan- try’s place. Details on the upcoming ar- rival weren’t available Wednesday. “It was all really just timing and my own personal life,” Sam Soloway, Planet Pantry’s president, said of the closure. “It didn’t have anything to do with busi- ness or lack of support.” She called the sale of her items to Milieu Market a “good thing.” Her busi- ness diverted nearly 40,000 plastic con- tainers, she added. Planet Pantry and Milieu Market bulk ordered some products together. The latter business accepts Planet Pan- try gift cards and took on its loyalty program. Milieu Market had intended to sell its house brand in the U.S., but backed away from the plan recently due to the ongoing trade war, Plett said. gabrielle.piche@winnipegfreepress.com GABRIELLE PICHÉ SUPPLIED Milieu Market’s products in Steinbach. Annual Manitoba Construction Career Expo pitches post-school possibilities to some 1,500 students BUILDING CONNECTIONS C OLE Wiebe aspires to be a diesel mechanic after he graduates, but on Wednesday, he gave being a lineworker a try. The Grade 10 Windsor Park Collegi- ate student was among the hundreds of students who visited the power line technician climbing station organized by Manitoba Hydro at the Manitoba Construction Career Expo. After putting on a belt, spurs and an orange high-vis hoodie, Cole ascended the six-metre-tall pole at Red River Ex- hibition Place, ringing a Winnipeg Blue Bombers cowbell to signal he’d made it to the top. “It was pretty enjoyable,” the teen said once his feet were back on the ground. It was his first time at the annual expo, which is organized by the Win- nipeg Construction Association and its partners, Apprenticeship Manitoba and the province of Manitoba. “It’s interesting to see all the stuff and it’s interactive,” Cole said. “I like that a lot.” At the Manitoba Masonry Institute’s booth, Leah Lindell got a chance to “butter a brick” — put mortar on a con- crete block and add it to an arch partici- pants were constructing with the guid- ance of an experienced mason. The Grade 10 student was one of about 40 teenagers from Lundar High School who made the 75-minute bus trip. “I just wanted to see what it was all about,” Leah said. She’s considering a career in veterinary medicine and has never thought about working in the trades before. “But I thought this would be a neat experience. It’s pretty fun.” There were around 30 career tracks on display at the one-day event, which attracted nearly 1,500 students from around Manitoba. Organizers paid for buses and lunch, as well as the substitute educators re- quired to teach the students that didn’t come to the event. Winnipeg Construction Association president Ron Hambley said the WCA has organized the expo for more than 15 years because its members — which include 800 businesses that work in in- dustrial, commercial and institutional construction — are concerned about the future number of workers entering the trades. It’s the “single largest issue” on their minds, according to Hambley. “This (expo) flows from that,” he said. “So many (students) will never see any- thing; they’ll never tour a construction site or have the opportunity to see any of the tools that are inside. So this is a one-day opportunity for about 1,500 kids to have a look around.” At the Manitoba Construction Sector Council’s booth, students could play games that showcased different skills required to build a home. The activ- ities, which included a virtual reality simulator, highlighted not only the im- portance of hand-eye co-ordination but communication skills as well. A $10,000 drone at the booth served to illustrate what Ramir Diaz, educa- tion and training manager at the coun- cil, calls “a trending career path” in construction: drone operator. Students who visited the Manitoba Institute of Trades and Technology booth learned about the school’s CAD (computer-aided design) technician program; at the St. John Ambulance display, participants got a brief intro- duction to CPR using one of two train- ing dummies. Meanwhile, at one of the most popu- lar booths, members of the Architec- tural Woodwork Manufacturers Asso- ciation of Canada showed students how to use glue, an air nailer and a router to assemble and sand their own shadow boxes — just in time to give mom on Mother’s Day. “We hope to introduce them to what woodworking’s all about,” said Rick Mostert, an AWMAC member who has worked in the trades for more than 35 years. “We want to invest in our future … Hopefully, they want to get into an apprenticeship.” It was an exciting day for Eleanor Wainio, a Grade 12 student at Sturgeon Heights Collegiate. Attending the school has introduced her to a variety of trades, including carpentry and power mechanics; next week, she’s taking her exam to become a certified welder. “It’s incredible,” she said of the expo. “Everything they have to offer is better than a presentation in a school gym.” She already has a full-time job lined up at a renovation company once she graduates in June, and plans to pursue a career in heating, ventilation and air conditioning. “It gives you a sense of accomplish- ment and a feeling of pride knowing you did something not everyone can do,” she said of working in the trades. aaron.epp@freepress.mb.ca AARON EPP PHOTOS BY RUTH BONNEVILLE / FREE PRESS Kenneth Neumann, a Grade 10 student at St. Paul’s Collegiate in Elie, climbs a utility pole alongside schoolmate Jonas Dufresne (right) at Red River Exhibition Place on Wednesday as part of the 2025 Manitoba Construction Career Expo. Grade 10 students from St. Paul’s Collegiate in Elie work on their hammering skills. Suncor starts refurbishing decades-old upgrader parts CALGARY — Oilsands giant Suncor Energy Inc. has begun a three-month outage at one of its upgraders so it can begin to replace enormous components first installed almost six decades ago. The Calgary-based firm is in the midst of a multiyear project to replace eight original coke drums dating to 1967 at its Base Mine site north of Fort McMurray, Alta., with the goal of ex- tending the upgrader’s life by 30 years. The drums, weighing 270 tonnes and standing nearly 30 metres, are used in the upgrading process, where tarry oilsands bitumen is converted into a lighter crude that can then be refined into fuel. The outage at the upgrader — one of two at the mine — began May 1. Shelley Powell, Suncor senior vice-president in charge of major cap- ital projects, said the first major crane lift of equipment was successfully completed over the weekend. Desjardins Securities analyst Chris McCulloch said in a note much is rid- ing on the coke drum replacement. “Maintaining operational momentum will be pivotal for Suncor entering the heaviest stretch of scheduled mainten- ance this year,” he wrote. “In our view, success of the Base Plant and other planned turnarounds will materially impact the company’s ability to achieve its 2025 production guidance and (cap- ital expenditure) targets, which we maintain have been conservatively set.” Late Tuesday, Suncor said its pro- duction for the first three months of 2025 was 853,000 barrels of oil per day, refining throughput was 483,000 bar- rels per day and refined product sales were 605,000 barrels per day. — The Canadian Press ;