Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream Manufacturing Facility, Laurel, Maryland, USA

Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream Holdings Inc has been expanding its Laurel ice-cream manufacturing plant since November 2004. The new plant will be called the Laurel Operations Centre (LOC) and will be the largest of the company's six ice-cream plants across the USA. The new expansion was officially opened in October 2006 and will now complete the company's ice-cream manufacturing and distribution infrastructure in the USA.

The expansion has been a major project contributing toward the revitalisation of the Route 1 Corridor at Whiskey Bottom Road in North Laurel, Howard County, Maryland. Dreyer's has expanded the facility at the location previously occupied by Nestlé Ice Cream Co (during 2003 Dreyer’s and Nestlé ice-cream merged). The US$210m expansion is expected to create 700 new jobs and will be one of the largest ice-cream plants in the world – tripling the production of the existing plant.

Upon opening the recent expansion Dreyer's had hired an additional 450 employees (ice-cream makers, and shipping and maintenance personnel) to staff the new 705,000ft² facility. More than 725 employees now work at the Laurel plant and the company has announced its plans to add another 240 employees over the next two years. To keep Dreyer's in Laurel, Howard County promised to defer US$1m in property taxes for four years and to invest another US$1m in road access and infrastructure improvements.

CAPACITY AND CONSTRUCTION

After the expansion the plant had grown more than six-fold in size and boasts an area of 705,000ft² (bigger than 14 American football fields). The plant can store enough milk to fill ten Olympic-size swimming pools. The expansion has added five new ice-cream manufacturing lines to the original six and also has added the capacity for nine future lines, for when additional manufacturing capacity is required or for new products. The expansion has also added a 200,000ft², -20ºF ice-cream curing facility that will hold up to 23,000 pallets of ice-cream and frozen snacks, and a 23-door distribution centre.

The five-store curing facility finishes off (hardens) and temporarily houses freshly made ice-cream before it is loaded into freezer trucks and shipped to outlets across the USA. The company expects LOC to produce nearly 58 million gallons of packaged ice-cream and 370 million packages of frozen snacks a year. To make space for the growth of the new expansion on the Laurel site, Dreyer's purchased a 32-acre mobile home park adjacent to the plant site and chipped in to buy out the tenants, and even found homes for over 50 feral cats on the property.

Dennis Group directed the architectural design and engineering contract for the expansion. The LOC is slightly larger than the Bakersfield Operations Centre (BOC) in size and capacity and gives Dreyer's two of the world's largest ice-cream facilities, one on each coast of the USA, ideal positioning for the logistics of US ice-cream supply.

MANUFACTURED BRANDS

The LOC will now make and distribute more than 120 different Dreyer's products such as Edy's, Haagen-Dazs, Nestle and Skinny Cow ice-cream products and frozen snacks, including Dreyer's/Edy's Slow Churned Light ice-cream and Dreyer's/Edy's Dibs, bite-sized chocolate-coated ice-cream snacks.

Brands of frozen dessert products currently manufactured or distributed by Dreyer's in the United States include Grand, Slow Churned, Dibs, Haagen-Dazs, Nestle Drumstick, Nestle Crunch, Nestle Butterfinger, Nestle Toll House, Nestle Carnation, Nestle Push-Up, Frosty Paws, Fruit Bars, Starbucks and The Skinny Cow. Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream, Country Creamery Ice Cream comes in 12 flavours – natural, cream and French vanilla, toll house chocolate chip and mint chocolate chip, cookies 'n cream, Rolo caramel cup, Nestle chocolate, and fudge brownie sundae.

Dreyer's selected General Press as its label supplier for the new 1.65l injection moulded tub. Berry Plastics of Lawrence, KS will mould and IML will decorate the new polypropylene containers.

The company's premium products are marketed under the Dreyer's brand name throughout the Western states and Texas, and under the Edy's brand name throughout the remainder of the USA. Internationally, the Dreyer's brand extends to select markets in the Far East and the Edy's brand extends to the Caribbean and South America.

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