Pet food manufacturers love the Valley
Having grown up in Palmerton, Billy Cyr knows what the Lehigh Valley has to offer, especially for a company such as Freshpet.
The company has its main production facility in Hanover Township, Northampton County, and makes an alternative style of pet food that uses fresh ingredients and is sold out of a refrigerator.
Freshpet prides itself on locally sourced ingredients and takes advantage of the agricultural production in the Lehigh Valley region.
“There are a couple pockets like the Lehigh Valley around the country,” said Cyr, Freshpet’s CEO. “In fact, if you look in Kansas, you’ll find a similar pocket with their access to grain because some other pet foods use a lot of grain as well as access to the proteins that are used.
“So it starts with the fundamental foundation that has to be access to the agricultural inputs that you use the ingredients that used to make the pet food and eastern Pennsylvania, down into Delaware with an awful lot of chicken available. And so that certainly makes this an attractive place,” he said.
Freshpet isn’t alone when it comes to producing pet food in the Valley. Premium pet food manufacturer Spot & Tango recently opened its Upper Macungie Township plant. ALPO has been produced in South Whitehall Township for decades, despite changing ownership.
“Purina has proudly manufactured our trusted pet food products in the Lehigh Valley since 1958,” said Brian Blanck, factory manager. “In all of the communities where we operate, we strive to make a positive impact as a good neighbor and active contributor to the local community. That’s been our focus in Allentown for nearly 65 years, and it’ll remain our focus for the next 65 years and beyond.”
Freshpet
Freshpet has been growing steadily since it was founded in 2006. The company moved production from Bucks County in 2013 to 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.
Freshpet announced in May 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 and could add 100 workers to the 600 already employed.
Cyr said the Lehigh Valley’s location in the Northeast provides companies like Freshpet a perfect combination of proximity to both food sources and large consumer markets.
“That spells great opportunity for places like eastern Pennsylvania,” Cyr said, “where we have a very large rural or agricultural component, but it’s in proximity to fairly sizable top population centers where you have a skilled manufacturing talent base.
“If you chose to just go and build a manufacturing facility in the middle of nowhere where there’s lots of chickens and cows, you probably wouldn’t have the manufacturing, you’d have to go to a great distances to get the manufacturing talent you need,” he said. “If, on the other hand, you build your manufacturing facility in the middle of a city, you’d have to go a long way to get the agricultural inputs that you need. So the Lehigh Valley, which has both in proximity, has some advantages.”
ALPO
Located on Pope Road, off Route 309 just north of Allentown, the ALPO plant’s water tower is familiar to regular travelers along the Pennsylvania Turnpike Northeast Extension as a sign that they’ve arrived in the Valley.
The company traces its roots to 1936, when Robert F. Hunsicker founded Allen Products. With $200 cash, Hunsicker quit his job at the Allentown Chronicle & News to open a small business in his basement with a meat grinder, a 20-quart mixer and a bake oven.
It moved to its present location in 1958 and was sold to Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co. in 1964. ALPO was then sold to Nestle SA in 1980. After Nestle acquired Ralston Purina Co. in 2001, the Swiss owner combined the two iconic pet food brands under the name Nestle Purina PetCare Co.
These days, Purina’s South Whitehall factory produces several brands including ALPO, Beneful, Beyond, Dog Chow, Friskies, Purina One and Purina Pro Plan. It employs about 600 people, including several who have been there for decades. The company recently recognized four employees for 50 years of service.
The factory is 700,000 square feet after the most recent expansion of 53,000 square feet was completed in 2019. In the last five years, Purina has invested more than $175 million to enhance and expand its operations in the Lehigh Valley, according to Blanck.
“Together with our manufacturing facility in Mechanicsburg [Cumberland County], our operation in Allentown is vital to ensuring that consumers in the northeastern United States can access our trusted products,” Blanck said. “The Lehigh Valley region is a truly special place, and we’re very proud to continue building a legacy in this community that started nearly 65 years ago.”
Blanck said the factory recently achieved its zero waste for dispossal goal, meaning the location found ways to derive benefits from materials that would have been otherwise discarded. He said all of Purina’s facilities recycle, reuse, recover and compost waste from daily operations. In addition, the building uses 24% renewable energy.
Spot & Tango
Spot & Tango cut the ribbon Oct. 11 on its Upper Macungie plant.
The company leased a 66,700-square-foot facility on Morris Court, near Route 100, where it plans to eventually employ almost 100 workers. The company said the move will allow it to insource manufacturing, instead of relying on outside contractors.
The facility will manufacture all three types of the company’s UnKibble brand pet food. More than half of Spot & Tango’s subscription orders include UnKibble, so the expansion will help meet growing demand, the company said.
Founder and CEO Russell Breuer said Spot & Tango chose the Valley over 54 locations in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey.
“The Lehigh Valley offers a number of wonderful benefits,” he said. “There’s a lot of like-minded companies here in the Valley like Amazon and FedEx that are enabling significant growth, in particular in e-commerce. Two, infrastructure as far as roads, highways, buildings. And, three, talent pool access.
“And I’d say for the community, we’ve been working in close concert with the governor’s office and found just a synergy as far as what our hopes and dreams are as far as building a bigger business here in Lehigh Valley,” he said.
Like Freshpet, Spot & Tango sources fresh ingredients for its products.
“Everything is sourced in the U.S. and we work with only fresh ingredients,” Breuer said. “So whether that’s fresh ground beef or carrots or quinoa or green beans, we’re sourcing from a variety of suppliers within the U.S. to enable our fresh recipes.”
The company learned something from supply chain disruptions, especially during the COVID pandemic.
“I think COVID taught us a lesson about the importance of sourcing domestically,” Breuer said. “For us, keeping up with demand is really important as an element of product consistency, and innovation. We’ve built an innovation lab here in Allentown. Our goal is to use that to continue to introduce new products and build that manufacturing process when they want to do those things.”