PepsiCo UK recently announced it is investing £24 million (about US$33 million) in their Lincoln snack factory to upgrade their facilities, meet the growing consumer demand, and secure the building’s future.
The investment will see existing machinery at their long-standing city center site replaced by new equipment – including a compact packaging machine – creating training opportunities for employees including their apprentices, some of whom will be upskilled in using the state-of-the-art equipment and technology.
Already one of Britain’s iconic snacks, Quavers have continued to grow in popularity over the past year and are now bought by nearly one in three households in the UK. The investment will increase capacity at the factory, enabling their team to produce more Quavers to help satisfy this demand and make space for new production lines.
It also follows PepsiCo’s multimillion-pound investment in its Skelmersdale and Coventry Walkers factories to install specialist compact packaging machinery, leading to a 30% reduction in outer packaging on average across snacks multipacks. The new equipment at Lincoln will help remove even more packaging from their supply chain.
In line with their vision to build a world where packaging needs never become waste, these investments form part of their global commitment to reducing, recycling, and reinventing their packaging.
Nigel Beilby, site operations manager at PepsiCo’s Lincoln plant, said: “We’ve always had a strong heritage in the Midlands, providing jobs to almost 2,000 people in the region across our factories in Lincoln, Leicester and Coventry. For decades, our Lincoln factory has brought much-loved Quavers snacks to consumers up and down the country, and with this state-of-the-art technology, we’re confident that the site will continue to serve the nation for many years to come.”
According to Kwasi Kwarteng business secretary at PepsiCo, “It’s brilliant to see PepsiCo doubling-down on its commitment to Lincoln through this significant investment in the city centre factory Walkers has called home for more than half a century. This investment will help to deliver on our plan to spread opportunity across the Midlands by future-proofing the jobs of the factory’s outstanding employees by training them to use state of the art equipment, and further bolstering the workforce through their apprenticeship scheme.”
Alongside the Lincoln investment, over £1 million (about US$1,3 million) has been committed to their Walkers’ Coventry factory – which produces popular snacks such as Doritos, Wotsits, French Fries, Squares, Sunbites, and Cheetos – for additional equipment to maintain production during the work at Lincoln.
The new equipment will be installed at Lincoln in mid-2022, with initial work now underway.
Source: PepsiCo UK
