By Blake Haas
BLOOMINGTON – A massive $214.4 million facility expansion at Ferrero in Bloomington that brings over 200 jobs to the twin cities has been years in the making.
“First coming to town, they said, ‘hey, we’ve got some potential here, (but we’re) probably going to look at Canada and Mexico to (expand) to this, but we really want to start making chocolate,” Patrick Hoban, Bloomington-Normal Economic Development Council CEO and President said on the afternoon show. “And we’re like, ‘oh, like actually producing it?’ and they said ‘yes.’
So we tried to line up with the state and different incentives to do that, and it went so well that they decided, ‘hey, this has gone great, we love everything about this community, we’re going to go ahead and bring over the Kindo Bueno line.’”
The 169,000-square-foot addition is the second addition after Ferrero announced a $75 million expansion last October.
“Everything is done in phases,” Hoban added. “So it’s like, ‘is this going to work, how hard is this going to be?’ Because they’ve got multiple facilities, so they (didn’t) know if the workforce was going to be here, or how the planning was going to go, or even the approval process or the incentives. Because we are always in competition with other states.”
The facility, expected to be complete in 2024, would exclusively produce Kinder Bueno chocolate bars.
Blake Haas can be reached at Blake.Haas@Cumulus.com.
