Pinnacle Foods Plans $8M Plant Expansion

Pinnacle Foods Corp. plans to spend about $8 million to beef up its Swanson frozen foods plant in Fayetteville.

Art Shuster, the plant manager, said the expansion will add about 3,100 SF to the 420,000-SF plant and increase the number of employees by about 135 to 885. The plant employed about 950 workers a couple of years ago when it was owned by Vlasic Foods International.

Shuster said the majority of the $8 million will be spent on machinery to increase the plant’s productivity by 40 percent.

“The square-footage expansion is fairly small,” he said. “What we’re doing is investing internally in the line.”

The Fayetteville factory made about 12 million cases of Swanson dinners last year. (Each case contains 12 diners.) After the expansion is completed in September, the plant will produce about 18 million cases a year, Shuster said.

The expansion means the plant will be producing some new meals and will take over some lines from the company’s Omaha, Neb., plant.

“Typically, we had been a poultry producing plant,” Shuster said. “Now, we will be doing some beef products that had only been produced in Omaha.”

New products for the Fayetteville plant include “Buffalo Style Chicken Strips” and boneless roast chicken. The two meals will be sold as Swanson “Hungry Man Dinners.” The roast chicken will also be available as a Swanson “Homestyle Favorites” meal.

The Fayetteville plant will also begin making Swanson “Pot Pies” and “kid’s Meals” such as pizza, macaroni and cheese, and chicken nuggets.

Among the production lines being transferred from Omaha are “potato-topped pot pies” and “Great Starts Scrambled Eggs with Bacon” breakfast.

Shuster said Fayetteville competed with the Pinnacle plant in Omaha for the expansion. The two plants are the largest operated by Pinnacle, which is based in Cherry Hill, N.J.

Until last year, the Fayetteville plant was owned by Vlasic Foods International, the publicly traded pickle company that was spun off by Campbell Soup Co. in 1998 and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2001.

In May 2001, Vlasic’s North American assets were bought out of bankruptcy for $370 million by Pinnacle Foods, which was created by Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, a Dallas investment firm that includes Tom Hicks, owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team and Dallas Stars ice hockey team.

Vlasic had sales of more than $750 million in fiscal 2000, with about half of that coming from the Swanson division.

Shuster has been with the same company (under the names Campbell Soup, Vlasic and now Pinnacle) for 26 years. He has been at the Fayetteville plant since 1996.