Amy's Kitchen - Organic Food Processing Plant, White City, Oregon, USA

Amy's Kitchen, a well-known Santa Rosa California organic food processor, has built a new plant and expanded outside California for the first time. Much to the displeasure of the California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the company decided to construct the new plant between Medford and White City in Jackson County, Oregon.

Amy's Kitchen has made a point of developing a special relationship with its new local community since many of its organic produce suppliers are in this area. This means an excellent workforce and also financial incentives of over $1m for the new plant; Oregon has no sales tax, and business incentives around Medford mean that running costs for businesses are from one third to a half less than in California.

In addition to this, the popularity of Amy's Kitchen products has become more extensive across the US. The production facility outside California will help the company to supply a massive number of outlets across the country.

The company has invested over $40m in the new plant, which breaks down into $20m for the new building and $20m for new production equipment. The new plant has floor space of 176,000ft² and now employs 250 personnel.

The 50-acre site for the project is situated in Whetstone Industrial Park and was purchased in December 2004 for $350,000 from the City of Medford.

Construction started in the third quarter of 2005 and the plant opened in October 2006.

The new plant is being used to process vegetables and beans to produce a range of salsa, pasta sauce, pizza, pasta ready meals and a host of other vegetarian and vegan delicacies.

EXPANDING BUSINESS NEW PREMISES

Amy's Kitchen has been in business since 1987 and since it started it has built up an enviable reputation as producer of quality organic and vegetarian / vegan foods. The company currently employs over 850 personnel and sales in the 2005 financial year were over $125m. The new project is the natural progression of a successful expanding business; the company has been growing at between 25 and 30% per year in recent times.

The new plant is being built in two phases and includes two buildings, the second of which is designed to allow easy future expansion. The construction of the plant, including preparation of the ground and all construction work and construction management, was carried out by the LEED-certified contractor S&B James Construction.

LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is the national standard in the US for the construction of environmentally sustainable buildings using natural and locally sourced materials. The landscape design at the plant was carried out by Tom Richman of the design firm Catalyst from San Francisco.

There are four pizza lines at the plant provided and installed by Rademaker of Culemborg in the Netherlands. The first pizza line was installed in October 2006 and the remaining three were brought on-line by December 2006.

A further production line for entrees was installed in the eastern section of the building in January 2007. The line has about 15 steps to the pizza production process and produces a standard nine-and-half-inch variety, which are part cooked prior to being cooled and frozen.

AMY'S KITCHEN RANGE OF PRODUCTS

Amy's Kitchen started by producing a single product, the vegetable pot pie – this is what made the name in the organic and vegetarian food business. The company quickly expanded to several varieties and now produce over 130 different lines which are distributed nationwide.

The nine different varieties of pizza produced at the new plant are frozen at the White City facility and are then transported to US Cold Storage in Tracy, California for shipping and distribution to retailers. The new plant can produce 4.5 million cases of pizza per year.