Tyson Foods is building a $355 million bacon plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky, primarily for the production of Wright Brand and Jimmy Dean retail and foodservice products. The 400,000-square-foot facility is expected to create 450 jobs with production beginning in late 2023.

The people, companies and facilities making headlines.

Barvecue, producers of wood-smoked, plant-based proteins, has opened the world's largest plant-based smokehouse. The 10,000 square foot production facility, called Carolina Smokehouse, opens for production with an initial capacity of making 800,000 pounds of Barvecue a year and expects to employ 15 team members as production ramps up.

HempRise has opened its 100,000-square-foot operation in Jeffersonville, Indiana. The plant has the capacity to produce 10 metric tons of hemp biomass per day, which is equivalent to approximately 8 million pounds of biomass per year. The company selected Gray to design and build the facility.

Dr. Schär USA has broken ground on a 42,000-square-foot expansion of its manufacturing facility in Logan Township, N.J. This expansion comes exactly 10 years after Dr. Schär took eight shovels for their eight U.S. employees and broke ground on this New Jersey gluten-free bread production site. The plant expansion is needed to keep up with increasing demand of their gluten-free bread.

Bühler and Whitworth Bros—the UK’s largest miller—have opened a high-tech flour plant called Mill E3 at Whitley Bridge in Yorkshire, England. The data generated and analyzed at the Whitley Bridge plant will drive the evolution of milling technology from the current data assisted mill into a plant capable of using its own process parameters in a closed loop to optimize production. This development of the self-adjusting mill will be the precursor to the SmartMill.

Plant openings and expansions in food and beverage manufacturing for September 2021.