Another $8M to Beef Up Swanson Plant

After spending $8 million in 2002 to beef up its Swanson frozen foods plant in Fayetteville, Pinnacle Foods Group of Cherry Hill, N.J., plans to spend another $8 million to increase production at the plant this year.

The 423,100-SF facility, which was previously owned by Campbell Soup Co. and Vlasic International, will take up the slack from a plant Pinnacle Foods plans to close Sept. 3 in Omaha, Neb.

About 160 employees will be added to the Fayetteville plant’s payroll, 50 in July and the rest around December, said Pat Murray, director of manufacturing for the Fayetteville plant. The hirings will include 10 professional positions.

Murray said the majority of the new employees will be hired in Northwest Arkansas, while the rest will be transferred from the shuttered plant in Omaha. That will bring the total number of employees at the Fayetteville plant to more than 900.

Because of a merger earlier this year between Pinnacle Foods Holding Corp. and Aurora Foods of St. Louis, 27 food products will be added to the Fayetteville plant’s production this year, Murray said.

The $8 million in capital improvements will include adding a fifth production line to the Fayetteville plant and moving a large spiral freezer from Omaha to Fayetteville. The new freezer will look much like an addition to the building, Murray said, but the factory itself won’t be increased in size.

The hirings will increase the plant’s payroll by about $4.8 million next year, Murray said. With the added volume, Murray said he will outsource some of the production to Aurora’s plant in Jackson, Tenn.

In 2002, Pinnacle Foods added about 3,100 SF to the 420,000-SF plant and hired an additional 135 employees when it closed one of the two plants it then had in Omaha. The Fayetteville plant employed about 950 workers in 2000 when it was owned by Vlasic Foods.

Art Shuster, then-manager of the Fayetteville Swanson plant, said the majority of the $8 million spent in 2002 went for machinery to increase the plant’s productivity by 40 percent. The Fayetteville plant also began producing beef products in addition to poultry in 2002.

At that time, Shuster said, the Fayetteville factory made about 12 million cases of Swanson dinners last year. (Each case contains 12 dinners.) After the expansion was completed in September 2002, he expected the plant to produce about 18 million cases a year.

Murray said that number sounded high to him, but he wouldn’t give figures for current production levels at the plant.