Dive Brief:
- Westrock Coffee Co. opened a "roast to ready-to-drink" manufacturing facility in Conway, Arkansas, ahead of schedule on April 16, the company announced during its Q1 earnings call.
- The coffee company invested $315 million to build the 570,000-square-foot facility that produces coffee, tea and other beverages. It also includes a beverage development laboratory, according to a June 13 press release.
- The Conway facility will use production technologies such as robotics and end-to-end automation for “everything from green coffee to receiving through roast and grind, extraction, and all the way through to bottling and packaging,” according to the release.
Dive Insight:
Westrock Coffee also debuted a 530,000-square-foot warehousing and distribution center two miles away from the new factory. The proximity ensures “efficient product distribution, reduces transportation times, and maintains a smooth and transparent flow of materials and finished goods,” according to the release.
The two facilities are projected to create 600 new jobs, according to the initial June 2023 announcement.
Headquartered in Arkansas, Westrock Coffee got its start in Rwanda in 2009.
Westrock Coffee's product line includes coffee products such as single-serve pods and bag-in-box coffee, as well as business items including sweeteners, creamers and other supplies. Its new facility has a ready-to-drink cold chain multi-serve bottle and can production line, which already is in the product commercialization phase with several customers.
“And we continue to expect our glass bottle line to commence operations in the fourth quarter of this year, which remains completely sold out,” CEO and co-founder Scott Ford said on the May earnings call.
The CEO said the company is looking to grow its capacity to meet increased customer demand.
“Solely based on our currently committed order book, we already expect to run at 75% of installed capacity utilization in 2025, our first full year of production,” Ford said.
Westrock Coffee aims to take a vertically integrated approach to coffee production, bringing extraction, canning and product development under one roof, the CEO said. Doing so allows the company to adapt to different customers’ specific product demands by allowing them to bring in their own product development engineers and food scientists.
“Then they could say, ‘I want to turn this into a can, this into a bottle, this I want to extract where I can fill my own bottle, this I want to blend with milk, this I want to do with oat milk, this I want to do with an alternative plant-based milk,’” Ford said.
Now that the Conway facility is up and running, the company is looking to save costs in other areas of its network to “consolidate operations to where they're most profitable to be able to produce,” CFO Chris Pledger said during the earnings call.
“Are there opportunities to rationalize assets in order to be able to streamline how we operate?” Pledger said. “And if we can save expenses in the process, then that's just a smart thing to be able to do.”
