Walking down your neighborhood grocery aisle could have you believe your food traveled from around the world; that
Mama Celeste brought her frozen pizzas straight from an Italian kitchen or that
Log Cabin Syrup was tapped in a redwood cottage in the Pacific Northwest. In fact both those brands and many of your favorite foods are produced by the same local company.
Pinnacle Foods, headquartered in Cherry Hill, NJ,produces everything from pickles to pretzels to cake mix, all from the same tidy corporate offices. But with its newest brand acquisition, frozen vegetable manufacturer
Birds Eye Foods, Pinnacle had outgrown its current facility. This week, after a summer spent renovating a former Cherry Hill steel mill, Pinnacle dropped the curtain on its new corporate center.
"The reason for the new facility is because the company is growing and expanding," says Pinnacle VP of Corporate Affairs David Socolow. "With this acquisition, we have really reached big-company status, doing millions of transactions a year and all of those transactions are handled through this new facility. Our old facility was starting to get a little tight."
The announcement is big news for Cherry Hill, which offered business improvement and business retention grants totaling $1,102,600. This assistance was considered a major factor in Pinnacle's decision to remain and grow in South Jersey. The 57,000-sq-ft facility will allow Pinnacle to add 90 new jobs and keep an additional 130 jobs in the region. But according to Socolow, there was another reason Pinnacle kept operations close to home.
"Ultimately, we wanted to retain our existing, high-quality, well-trained workforce," says Socolow. "And also, this is a great place to attract new people. Because we are hiring to expand our company, this is a great place to attract talent in the food industry."
Source: David Socolow, Pinnacle Foods
Writer: John Steele