Baie Comeau’s location near the Gulf of St. Lawrence provides year-round access to the Atlantic Ocean.

The expansion of the St. Lawrence Seaway dramatically improves the route for commodities leaving the Great Lakes region.

Opened in 1960, Cargill’s new ocean terminal is welcomed with ceremony and fanfare.

President John MacMillan, Jr., celebrates the terminal’s debut. Behind him, Cargill’s Earle Green (left) and Whitney MacMillan join the celebration.

Creating a New Way to Serve Global Markets by Water

Perched on the St. Lawrence Seaway, the port at Baie Comeau unlocks new opportunities—now Cargill can serve markets by land and by sea.

January 01, 2015

In 1954, Canada and the US announced their commitment to deepen and extend the St. Lawrence Seaway by 1959. Improving the broad channel, which divides southern Quebec and upstate New York along its main stretch, would dramatically improve transportation throughout the Great Lakes and onward into the North Atlantic Ocean.

Seeking new ways to serve global markets, Cargill’s president, John MacMillan, Jr., was inspired by the news. As previous decades were defined by grain elevators along American railroads, the years to come would focus on developing ports along international waterways.

With the St. Lawrence Seaway as a new transportation route, John Jr. made the company’s largest capital investment to date, building an ocean terminal at Baie Comeau on the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. Several sites had been considered, but he ultimately gravitated to Baie Comeau for its accessible location, existing port infrastructure and proximity to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. While other areas of the Seaway froze during winter’s deep chill, the waters at Baie Comeau did not—granting Cargill unique, year-round access to the Atlantic.

Baie Comeau Ocean Term Est Inpage

[image caption] Bushels are unloaded from barges (1), scaled and fed into storage silos (2-3). Grain is then inspected (4), and scaled for ocean-bound ships (5-6).

Today, it remains Cargill’s largest transfer terminal in North America, featuring a 13 million-bushel elevator and the capacity to hold 440,000 metric tons of grain. Building at Baie Comeau was just one of Cargill’s initiatives to meet the growing international demand for US commodities. With newfound access to the Atlantic, high-quality grains became accessible to underserved and undernourished regions around the globe.