BOOM IN CANNED FOOD MEANS A BOOM IN CANS
With soup, vegetables flying off market shelves to feed a shut-in nation, factories are bustling
The restaurants in downtown Hannibal, Mo., have been closed for weeks because of the coronavirus, but on the town’s western outskirts, its largest employer is buzzing.
The big General Mills plant that turns out cans of Progresso soup is still operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, just as it was before the virus hit. It employs 1,000 people and is hiring to fill 50 openings.
“I drove by the other day and the parking lot was full of cars, trucks coming and going,” said James Hark, a manager of an auto body shop and mayor of Hannibal, the boyhood home of Mark Twain.
Someone has to make all those cans. The surge in demand for processed foods like canned soups and vegetables during the pandemic has rippled through the food industry’s supply chain. Makers of metal containers have had to speed up production to keep pace.
Take Silgan Holdings, a maker of metal and plastic containers for consumer goods with more than 50 plants across the country. The company, based in Stamford, Conn., reported record first-quarter earnings, in part because of a jump in demand for cans.
Another big maker of food and beverage cans, Crown Holdings, went into the year planning to increase production in the United States, and the virus has only added urgency to the effort. Crown’s website lists 81 open production jobs at its 25 U.S. plants, some for a third production line being set up at a factory in Nichols, N.Y. “We can sell every can we can make,” said Thomas Fischer, Crown’s vice president for investor relations and corporate affairs.
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