Utz Brands Inc., a leading U.S. manufacturer of branded salty snacks, announced that the company’s subsidiary Utz Quality Foods LLC has purchased a new, recently completed snack food manufacturing facility in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, from Evans Food Group Ltd. dba Benestar Brands and related affiliates. The purchase includes the existing building, land and pork-rind production equipment.
Utz will convert the space into a fully operational snack food manufacturing facility starting in 2022. The current 125,000-square-foot facility can be expanded to 200,000 square feet and is expected to add over 115 local jobs.
The new facility will support the growing demand for Utz's brands in the Southeast, Northeast and Mid-South regions. The new facility contains state-of-the-art high-speed pork rind manufacturing lines and will enable multi-line production across Utz’s key sub-categories in the near future. Operationalizing the recently constructed Kings Mountain facility is quicker and more cost-effective than building from the ground up or renovating an existing facility.
Benestar will also become a supplier of pork pellets from its Chicago operations to Utz.
"With continued growth and excitement for our snack food brands, we are very excited to expand our roots in North Carolina, where we will be adding over 115 new jobs over time," said Cary Devore, chief operating officer, Utz Brands Inc. “This is a strong step forward in optimizing our plant and logistics network, and it will allow us to in-source manufacturing across several product types that we currently outsource to some degree. This transaction increases our operational flexibility and will contribute to higher long-term margins over time, based on identifiable, multi-faceted cost synergies.”
