The Town That Smelled Like Pickles

Growing up in Dunnville, Ontario, Canada, my summers didn’t smell like fresh-cut grass or backyard barbecues. They smelled like pickle brine, turning the air vinegary from June until fall.

Nearly every teenager at Dunnville Secondary School worked at the Bick’s pickle plant. I didn’t. I worked at my father’s newspaper and a pizza shop instead, slightly jealous of friends coming home with bigger paychecks.

One was my best friend, Stephanie Pehar. Years later, when I called her to ask what I had missed out on, the answer was less glamorous than I remembered.

The Bick’s story starts nowhere near Dunnville. In 1939, Dutch immigrant George Bick started a cucumber farm north of Toronto with his son, Walter, and began pickling the crop using an old family recipe. By the early 1950s, Walter Bick had introduced “fresh pack” processing to Canada, packing cucumbers within 24 hours of picking.

Dunnville had processed vegetables long before Bick’s name appeared on the plant. Government records from the 1950s list Grand Valley Canners Ltd. in Dunnville. Bick’s was an already familiar Canadian brand when it shifted production from Scarborough, near Toronto, to Dunnville in 2001. To the rest of the country, Bick's was a jar on a grocery shelf. In Dunnville, it was an industry happening in your backyard.

Pehar worked the line in high school, where summer heat mixed with steam from the production floor. Up front, she remembers "raw cucumbers being stuffed in the jars,” workers cleaning them, and products moving through the pasteurizer. It was “crazy hot,” she said. Pehar worked the back as a “box girl,” packing product as it came at her fast, reaching, twisting, and setting boxes down again, until the repetitive motion had injured her shoulder.

Former employees interviewed for the Cayuga Heritage Centre’s museum project years later remembered staff barbecues, Christmas parades, and Don Bickle, the company’s pickle mascot. One recalled packing icicle pickles as a 14-year-old in the late 1960s, earning 13 cents for every six jars, enough in that first summer to buy herself a winter coat.

The place generated its share of folklore. At Dunnville Secondary, nearly everyone knew some version of a story about a cat that supposedly ended up on the pickle line. Pehar remembers hearing it, but she doesn’t know whether it happened. I just know it was enough to turn me off pickles until I moved away.

What is documented is what happened when the plant disappeared. Bick’s closed its Dunnville facility on November 30, 2011, as its U.S. parent company, J.M. Smucker, consolidated operations to cut costs. Ontario farmers who’d grown cucumbers for Bick’s had to find other buyers or switch crops. I had already left by then, so I never experienced that first summer when the smell people had grown up with was suddenly gone, or the way the town pushed through the early economic strain to eventually make it work.

And still the story survives.

In late 2024, Haldimand County Museums began developing The Pickle Project exhibit after receiving an unusual donation: roughly 80 pickle cruets connected to the old facility. Three museum sites collaborated on an exhibition tracing pickles from farms to factory to table. By fall 2025, those memories had become The Pickle Project, complete with a canning competition and pickle-themed murder mystery event. Bick’s was a big dill.

It took moving to California and biting into an ordinary pickle for me to understand why a town would preserve the memory of a pickle factory. Turns out you can take the kid out of Dunnville, but you can’t quite take the brine out of memory.