Core construction of the Smucker’s facility expansion in Longmont is complete, company spokesman Frank Cirillo said in an email Tuesday.
Some interior installation and manufacturing construction needs finishing touches, but Smucker’s is already hiring a variety of roles — particularly technicians — for the expansion, Cirillo explained. When hiring is complete, the Longmont plant’s workforce will include more than 560 employees, he said.
The company began expansion of the plant in 2020 with the 240,000-square-foot addition, which brings the total size of the facility to 674,000 square feet, Cirillo said.
The company purchased the land for the plant — at 2900 Peak Ave., in Weld County — for $4.6 million in 2017.
Longmont and Weld County contributed nearly $10 million in incentives for the plant’s first phase of construction, which was completed in 2019. Gov. Jared Polis, Lt. Gov. Dianne Primavera and J.M. Smucker Company CEO Mark Smucker attended a ribbon cutting for the first phase of completion.
“We are very proud to be a part of the Boulder and Weld county communities,” Cirillo said in a statement. “In addition to offering employment to local residents, we have worked with partners to identify opportunities to support the local community through product donations, funding and employee volunteering.”
The facility, which can now produce up to 420 million Uncrustables annually, was named the 2020 Food Engineering Plant of the Year.
“This expansion is part of our continued work to invest in expanding our capacity to meet unprecedented consumer demand for the Uncrustables product,” Cirillo’s statement read.
Designed and built by Dennis Group, the Longmont plant is the largest single-line bakery in the world, according to Food Engineering magazine.
Over the past two decades, Smucker’s Uncrustables brand has grown from $10 million in annual sales to $500 million, earnings reports show. The company expects the frozen sandwich brand to deliver $1 billion in annual sales by 2027.
