The person who helped bring Stuffed Puffs and Freshpet to manufacture their products in the Lehigh Valley is starting another food and beverage operation in the area.
Rich Thompson, founder and managing partner of Factory LLC, recently started a plant to makes powdered drinks, protein bars and other consumable products.
Factory Manufacturing Inc. opened a 75,000-square-foot facility in Hanover Township, Northampton County, across the street from Freshpet’s pet food operations. It will manufacture products for smaller companies affiliated with Factory LLC and is open to making them for unaffiliated companies.
The plant in the suburbs is an outgrowth of Factory LLC, which was started five years ago in south Bethlehem in a former Bethlehem Steel building. Factory is a 40,000-square-foot innovation center that offers a chance for businesses to “scale up” their products and introduce them to a wider audience, which translates into higher sales and more income.
Eventually, the scaled-up company could be sold, with its owners, Thompson and his investors earning a profit. There is also a pool of $250 million in private-equity funds available to buy stakes in the companies.
The new building, in Lehigh Valley Industrial Park IV, is equipped to produce and package powdered drinks, supplements and energy/protein bars. It is making powdered beverages for Roar, a sports drink company, and for Honey Stinger, which specializes in performance chews, energy waffles and protein bars.
“We decided that we wanted to build a couple of plants for a couple of brands that we have,” said Thompson, who left as Freshpet CEO in 2016 to found Factory LLC. ”One of them is Honey Stinger, which is getting into the hydration business, and Roar. We wanted to provide quality manufacturing with innovation in both product and in packaging.”
Thompson said hydration and powdered drinks are a growing industry as environmentally conscious people cut back on using plastic in favor of reusable bottles.
“We’ve done a lot of manufacturing in the Valley,” he said. “That was one of the main reasons that we wanted to get into it. The other one is that we are certainly a big believer that hydration in powder form, whether it’s in sticks, bags or tubs, is the future because people can’t afford to move plastic and heavy objects around this country with the price of fuel, the price of supply chain and with a clean carbon footprint.”
Factory Manufacturing will begin with a staff of 12, but Thompson says the workforce will gradually expand.
“We have about 12 to start with, just for the first shift and we plan on adding a second shift and third shift if everything goes well,” Thompson said. “We should have up to 45 people at some point. We’ll be looking for some more operators, for sure.”
Powdered drinks are a multibillion-dollar industry that needed a production facility on the East Coast, Thompson said.
“We’re talking to some fairly big contractors and there’s not a lot of hydration plants on the East Coast,” he said. “Most hydration plants are in California, Salt Lake City and in the South. So we certainly feel that having a hydration plant on the East Coast gives us a big advantage at least for the retailers up and down the East Coast.”
Thompson said the Valley was a natural place for such a venture because you can reach 40% of the U.S. population within eight hours. “That’s a good distribution waypoint.”
It’s a reason why the Lehigh Valley’s manufacturing had an economic output of $8.4 billion, making it the largest contributor to the region’s $47 billion gross domestic product, which measures total market value of the goods and services produced in a region over a year. That sector made up about 18% of the Valley’s private sector output, while the national average for manufacturing was 12%.
The latest number, which was released in December by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, is a record for the region, according to the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corp.
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