PepsiCo announces £24.5m Lincoln factory investment
The investment would lead to existing machinery at the long-standing city centre site being replaced by new equipment, including a compact packaging machine that it claimed would help remove more packaging from its supply chain.
PepsiCo will also create training opportunities for employees and apprentices, some of whom will be upskilled to be able to use the newly installed equipment and technology.
Nigel Beilby, Lincoln site operations director for PepsiCo said: “We’ve always had a strong heritage in the Midlands, providing jobs to almost 2,000 people in the region across our factories in Lincoln, Leicester and Coventry.
Serving the nation
“For decades, our Lincoln factory has brought much-loved Quavers snacks to consumers up and down the country, and with this state-of-the-art technology, we’re confident that the site will continue to serve the nation for many years to come.”
Quavers continued to grow in popularity over the past year and are now bought by nearly one in three households in the UK, according to PepsiCo.
The investment will increase capacity at the factory, enabling the team to produce more Quavers to help satisfy this demand, as well as make space for new production lines.
PepsiCo’s latest investment coincided with a £1m commitment by the manufacturer into its Walker’s Coventry factory for additional equipment to maintain production during the work at Lincoln.
Last month, PepsiCo announced plans to open a 1bn Polish zloty (£187m) production facility in Poland, said to be its most sustainable food manufacturing plant in Europe.
Doubling down on its commitment
Commenting on the Lincoln investment, business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said: “It’s brilliant to see PepsiCo doubling-down on its commitment to Lincoln through this significant investment in the city centre factory Walkers has called home for more than half a century.
This investment will help to deliver on our plan to spread opportunity across the Midlands by future-proofing the jobs of the factory’s outstanding employees by training them to use state of the art equipment, and further bolstering the workforce through their apprenticeship scheme.”
The new equipment at the Lincoln plant will be installed by mid-2022, with initial work now underway.
Meanwhile, high street baker Greggs has completed a new fully-automated cold store at its Newcastle upon Tyne production site.
