IOC Brand Guidelines: Labrador City Pellets, a 418 km Railway & the Port of Sept-Îles

American steel money, a Newfoundland mining charter and a lake district in Labrador.

The Iron Ore Company of Canada, known almost everywhere by its initials, IOC, was formed in 1949 by a partnership of Canadian and American firms. English Wikipedia names the largest of them as the M.A. Hanna Company of Cleveland, alongside Hollinger, Labrador Mining, National Republic, Armco, Youngstown and Wheeling-Pittsburgh.

The ore itself had been found earlier. English Wikipedia traces the company’s roots to Labrador Mining and Exploration, created under a 1938 Newfoundland statute with wide exploration and mining rights on the Labrador mainland. That company discovered the deposit IOC now works, received the leases and the surface rights on which the town of Labrador City was laid out, and sublet the leasehold to IOC, which built the mine, the railway and the port. The landholder survives in a different form: since 2010 it has been the Labrador Iron Ore Royalty Corporation (LIORC), a company listed in Toronto that collects a royalty on IOC’s sales and holds a minority stake in it.

IOC has been producing from its present facilities at Labrador City since 1962, LIORC says. In August 2024, International Mining reported that the company was marking its 70th anniversary with a reception at the historic Quebec North Shore and Labrador station in Sept-Îles. From 1977 to 1983 its president was Brian Mulroney, who went on to become Prime Minister of Canada, English Wikipedia notes.

Five pits, a pellet plant, 418 kilometres of track and a year-round port.

IOC is an integrated chain rather than a single mine. Its operations near Labrador City, in the iron-rich geological belt known as the Labrador Trough, include a mine with five working pits, a concentrator and a pelletising plant, according to the company and International Mining. The finished product travels south on the Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway (QNS&L), a wholly owned subsidiary, for 418 kilometres to IOC’s own marine terminal at Sept-Îles, on the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The company’s corporate office is in Montreal.

LIORC’s description of the operation, updated for its investors, gives the detail. Ore is mined in open pits, carried by trucks to automated trains or an overland conveyor, ground in four wet mills and upgraded in a spiral plant from about 38 per cent iron to roughly 65 to 66 per cent. The pellet plant rolls the concentrate into balls between 9.5 and 12.5 millimetres across before drying and firing them, and it makes several grades: standard acid pellets, low-silica acid pellets, low-silica fluxed pellets and direct-reduction pellets. LIORC gives the railway a capacity of 46 million tonnes a year; it runs up to nine ore trains of 160 or 240 cars, each car carrying between 95 and 100 tonnes, and it also hauls other producers’ ore from the Labrador Trough. The Sept-Îles terminal works all year, loading ships of between 25,000 and 255,000 tonnes.

Some of the railway inside the mine is unusual. English Wikipedia describes a short electrified line at the Carol Lake mine on which small electric locomotives, running without crews, carried raw ore from the pits to the processing plant as of 2019, sounding a horn every few seconds as a warning; it calls the line the last electrified freight railway in Canada.

The company presents its pellets and concentrate as “premium” products with low phosphorus and low alumina — its own description, which LIORC repeats.

Design and documentation.

Iron ore miners sell a raw material that few people ever see, so their public image is built from the places where it comes out of the ground. The standard picture is aerial: a red-earth open pit cut into benches, haul roads spiralling down its walls, trucks reduced to specks. Underground miners show the opposite view — tunnels, drill rigs and lit caverns far below the surface — but the aim is the same, to make scale legible.

The second set of images is about movement. Iron ore is heavy and cheap to dig but costly to carry, so miners photograph the chain that gets it to customers: ore trains kilometres long crossing dry country or snow, pellet plants and stockpiles, and export jetties where bulk carriers load at the end of a long line. Rail and port pages often get as much space as the mines themselves.

Much of what these companies publish is explanation. Websites and reports carry geology and grade explainers, describe ore types such as lump, fines and pellets, and set out reserves and production as the companies report them. Alongside sit pages on rehabilitation of mined land, water use and tailings, and on newer projects to cut emissions in steelmaking.

The last layer is accountability. Miners publish community and Indigenous-partnership reports, accounts of resettlement where mines reach towns, sustainability reports and, for listed or state-owned groups, detailed annual reports. For a designer, the identity of an iron ore company lives as much in these documents, maps and diagrams as in any logo.

Three shareholders and a Rio Tinto badge.

Rio Tinto acquired its interest in August 2000 through its takeover of the Australian company North Ltd, English Wikipedia says. Today LIORC lists IOC’s owners as Rio Tinto, which operates the business and holds 58.7 per cent, Mitsubishi Corporation with 26.2 per cent and LIORC itself with 15.1 per cent, and the company’s own website says it is “owned by three shareholders.” In everyday use the business increasingly appears as Rio Tinto IOC, the form used by International Mining in 2024.

2026 has been a difficult year. In August CBC News reported that second-quarter production had fallen sharply and that the company described a “strategic operational reset” to catch up on deferred waste removal and improve what it calls pit health — a multi-year effort, according to the filing CBC quoted. Earlier in 2026 Rio Tinto had announced cuts to non-union jobs across its Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec operations, CBC reported, and internal cost-saving measures included cancelling the annual IOC Day celebrations.

The company’s communications are bilingual — its French name is Compagnie minière IOC — and its website groups community pages around Labrador City and Sept-Îles, noting that Sept-Îles is called Uashat, meaning “bay,” in the local Innu language. It also publishes annual sustainable development reports and an employee magazine, Mine to Port.

For a design guide, IOC shows how an iron ore company’s identity is carried by its infrastructure: the railway, the pellet plant and the port do the work a logo might do elsewhere. Compare its majority owner Rio Tinto and its Labrador Trough neighbour Champion Iron. For this guide we use hematite red, a slate and a snow white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep IOC’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.