Delightful News for Quebecers Who Love Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean Tourtière

Quebecers will now be able to experience the famous Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean tourtière as the dish will now be distributed across the province.

It is the regional company Viandomax that is behind the nationwide marketing of the product.

According to Pierre-Yves Lévesque, the general manager of the company, being able to distribute tourtière on a large scale is an old dream come true: "The goal was to cross the Laurentians. To teach people from Quebec City, Montreal, and surrounding areas, to educate them about the tourtière, to explain to them what the real dish is."

Comedian Michel Barrette, who is originally from Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, acts as the spokesperson for the product. According to Mr. Barrette, the product offered by Viandomax is faithful to the traditional dish: "It's exactly my mother's tourtière, my grandmother's, the one we pass on from generation to generation. We will find it from Gatineau to Sept-Îles to Sherbrooke, from Sherbrooke to Val-d'Or. People will finally understand that tourtière is not meat pie."

Costco customers have already been able to taste Viandomax's famous tourtière for 14 years, but the product will now be distributed in most major food stores, including IGA and Metro: "I tried a lot to get it into the IGA, Metro, Maxi chains. It's people from Montreal; they're less familiar with it. To them, it's a product that's only eaten during the holidays. With Michel as the ambassador, it pushed the chains to try the product."

Michel Barrette invited the public to discover the dish by explaining: "We need to stop thinking it's just for the holidays. When I was young, my mother used to make tourtière in the trunk. She said, 'We're going to Saint-Gédéon, I made a tourtière. Put it in the trunk of the car, a blanket on top, we would arrive at the beach, and she would shout tourtière in the trunk! People would gather around and eat the tourtière."

The construction of a new factory dedicated to production will begin next month, and according to Mr. Lévesque, the product could go beyond the province: "At our Viandomax offices in Chicoutimi, we are building a 4.5 to 5 million facility dedicated solely to tourtière. It will be a federal factory that we can send to Ontario or the rest of Canada. We're going to go far with this product. To try it is to adopt it!"