Freshpet to expand operations in Lehigh Valley, may add 100 jobs
Even though his company is headquartered in Secaucus, N.J., Freshpet CEO Billy Cyr considers the pet food manufacturer to essentially be a Lehigh Valley company.
“This is the base of operations,” Cyr said in an interview Tuesday. “We think of ourselves as a Lehigh Valley company in very many ways. And we strive to, to get ourselves ingrained in this part of the community.”
That’s a big reason why Freshpet announced this week that it will build a 99,000 square-foot “innovation kitchen” less than a mile from its campus in Hanover Township, Northampton County. It is scheduled to open in the second half of 2023.
While the total number of new employees isn’t known yet, Cyr says it could be around 100, adding to the 600 already employed. He added that new employees will start at $21 per hour with a chance to rise to $27 after 18 months.
“We really would rather have higher-skilled, better trained employees getting paid more rather than lower-skilled employees getting paid less,” Cyr said.
Cyr, a Lehigh Valley native who grew up in Palmerton, said the new facility would allow the company to produce its dog and cat foods at its own place rather than at a subscale facility.
“It’s also going to allow us to produce some new products,” Cyr said. “We’ve talked quite a bit about being able to do products that might involve portion control products that might be catered toward large dogs, those kinds of innovations that we can’t make on our existing lines. And that’s what we’ll be producing at this facility. We’ll have three lines in it.”
Freshpet has been growing steadily since it was founded in 2006 to provide an alternative style of pet food that uses fresh ingredients and is sold out of a refrigerator. The company moved its production from Bucks County in 2013 to its location on North Commerce Way in Lehigh Valley Industrial Park IV, just north of Bethlehem.
The facility has grown, doubling in size a few years later and is at 100,000 square feet. The company then built Kitchen 2.0, which was completed in 2020, adding 140,000 square feet.
And it still wasn’t enough to meet demand. With the rise in pet adoptions during the COVID pandemic, along with supply chain issues, Freshpet was often sold out. Freshpet’s net sales were $425 million last year, a growth rate of 33%. The company expects $575 million in sales this year, which is a rise of 35%, and would mark six consecutive years of growth. On Tuesday, Freshpet announced a $350 million equity offering to accelerate and increase the company’s manufacturing capacity.
“In order to keep up with the demand, we’re finding that we have to build significantly more capacity,” Cyr said.
Besides the expansion in the Lehigh Valley, the company is building another plant in Ennis, Texas, dubbed Kitchen 3.0. It is being built in three phases and will be 600,000 square feet when completed.
During the company’s first-quarter earnings call Monday, Freshpet announced that it would build $2.9 billion of net sales capacity and is spending $1.4 billion on capacity expansions between 2022 and 2025
“And the facility we’re building here in the Lehigh Valley we’re proclaiming the Bethlehem Innovation Kitchen,” Cyr said. “It will enable us to create significantly new products that are on different product platforms than the ones we make today. And be able to produce them at a commercial scale.”
Freshpet has secured a lease with New Jersey-based J.G. Petrucci Co. a full-service design/build specialist and developer with offices in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. J.G. Petrucci’s subsidiary, Iron Hill Construction Management, will construct the shell and interior fit-out.