Blount Fine Foods to open $25m soup manufacturing plant in Portland
Blount Fine Foods, a prepared foods and soup manufacturer, has acquired a food manufacturing facility in Portland, Oregon, which will be converted into a soup manufacturing plant.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not revealed.
The new soup manufacturing plant is scheduled to open in the second half of 2020. Blount Fine Foods will invest over $25 million to equip the new facility with new processing equipment, which include a spiral hydro chiller for quick-chilling soups to lock in freshness. Other equipment include cooking kettles that are large enough for production efficiencies and at the same time small enough to enable soup to be made largely by hand in small batches.
Located at 17711 NE Riverside Parkway, the acquired facility served as the headquarters of Harry’s Fresh Foods. It provides an additional 80,000 square feet of production capacity for Blount Fine Foods’ lines of restaurant-quality soups and side dishes.
The Portland food manufacturing facility will join the company’s existing production facilities at its headquarters in Fall River, Massachusetts and in Warren, Rhode Island and McKinney, Texas.
Blount Fine Foods to open $25m soup manufacturing plant in Portland. Photo courtesy of Aline Ponce from Pixabay.
Todd Blount – president and chief executive of Blount Fine Foods said: “Market demand for all soups, but especially our premium soups, continues to increase, with flavors, sizes, and eating occasions creating more opportunity for our customers.
“Adding this facility meaningfully rounds out our nationwide network of plants and distribution points and allows us to get the best ingredients to the ideal plant, and then ship the highest quality product on to the customer in the most efficient manner possible. In many ways, we hope this equates to an endless and uninterrupted supply of the world’s best soup.”
At the time of opening, the soup producing plant will employ nearly 50 people, which is expected to be tripled when it will be fully operational in 2021.
Blount Fine Foods has also signed an agreement with a third-party logistics (3PL) partner that will offer expanded logistics and distribution across the US.