Amy’s Kitchen shelves plans to open new Santa Rosa plant

Fast-growing Amy’s Kitchen has been adding space and workers in Santa Rosa, but the company has shelved its previously announced plans to open a shuttered food plant off Bellevue Avenue.

Instead, the Petaluma natural food maker has put its plans for future expansion on a newly acquired plant in Pocatello, Idaho and a pending $95 million plant project in New York.

The company last August announced it had leased the former home of G&G Specialty Foods in southwest Santa Rosa and was planning to one day employ 150 people there making entrees and snacks.

That announcement came about seven months after the company confirmed it had scuttled plans to build a $50 million plant in Santa Rosa and to eventually employ 800 workers there. The new plant project was killed largely due to costs associated with hooking up to the city’s water and sewer systems.

With the Bellevue site, Amy’s had hoped “to literally move in and start making product,” Chief Financial Officer Mark Rudolph said last week. But the company soon found it would take “a lot of time and money to produce there.”

“Our biggest issue was we didn’t have the time,” he said.

Trying to keep up with growing sales has meant that Amy’s main plants in Santa Rosa and Medford, Ore., have been “bursting at the seams,” Rudolph said.

But the company soon learned that the Bellevue plant needed not only improvements but also a city use permit.

The latter was triggered because the facility had been idle for more than two years. A city planning official estimated the use permit process could take three to six months, including time for environmental review, before Amy’s could receive a decision.

In the meantime, Amy’s found a shuttered H.J. Heinz Co. plant in Pocatello. Company officials viewed it on Sept. 14. and by Dec. 15 the company was making its first products there, Rudolph said.

“We talk about it being a miracle,” Rudolph said of the discovery.

Amy’s CEO and co-founder Andy Berliner explained that the company needs Pocatello’s production facilities in order to keep growing until an East Coast plant can open around 2018 in Goshen, N.Y. With the Idaho plant, he said, “we have the capacity to get there.”

Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce President Jonathan Coe said that while there always is some disappointment when new jobs aren’t created here, that “does nothing to diminish Amy’s significant role in the county” or the benefits that come from the overall growth of a locally based company.

“Quite frankly,” Coe said, “the more they grow, the more significant they become.”

While Amy’s won’t be using the 56,000-square-foot plant on Bellevue, in the last year it has leased another 40,000 square feet at the former Ritz Food Service warehouse on Dutton Avenue and another 10,000 square feet of office space near the main plant on Northpoint Parkway.

As well, Amy’s employment in the county has grown to ?1,000 employees this year from about 730 in 2012. Those figures don’t include the 80 workers to be hired for the company’s drive-thru restaurant slated to open in May in Rohnert Park. When fully operational, the restaurant is expected to employ about 105 workers.

In New York, Amy’s must still go through the local environmental review and planning process required for turning bare ground into the site of a major food production complex.

Even so, Berliner said “we’re feeling pretty confident” about being able to one day open the Goshen site. He added, “We don’t have too many choices.”

You can reach Staff Writer Robert Digitale at 521-5285 or robert.digitale@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @rdigit