Bremner to cut 135 jobs in Poteau

Bremner Food Group announced Wednesday (April 20) plans to cut approximately 135 positions at its Poteau cracker plant, adding negative labor pressure in a metro area that reported a 9.1% unemployment rate in February.

KFSM 5 News, a content partner with The City Wire, first broke the story of the layoffs that are to take effect in June.

Company officials blamed the reductions on seasonal demand and other volume declines at the location. The facility produces a variety of cracker products.

Bremner is a division of St. Louis-based Ralcorp Holdings, the company that purchased in 1997 the Wortz cracker plant in Poteau. Ralcorp employs about 9,000 in the U.S. and Canada, with annual sales of more than $3 billion. Bremner is the nation’s largest supplier of private label cookies and crackers and produces quality emulations of the leading national brand cookies and crackers.

As of September 2009, the company employed 500 in Poteau.

The layoffs will impact hourly positions in production operations and salaried, administrative positions, the company said. The hourly employees are represented by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Union, local 346.

Company officials also said they will continue an “aggressive pursuit” of new business for the Poteau plant.

“We hope to get everyone back to work as soon as possible and minimize the impact this has on our employees,” Jeff Hollis, director of operations at Bremner’s Poteau facility, said in a statement.

Poteau, located in LeFlore County, is within the Fort Smith metro area. The February unemployment rate of 9.1% was down from 9.2% in January. The metro area manufacturing sector employed an estimated 21,000 in February, unchanged from the revised 21,000 during January, but down from the 21,100 employed in the sector in February 2010. Employment in the sector is down 31.5% from a decade ago when January 2001 manufacturing employment in the metro area stood at 30,700.