BROCKTON, Mass. —
Food factories across Massachusetts are turning out huge numbers of popular products for convenience stores, grocery stores and restaurants daily.
NewsCenter 5’s Doug Meehan visited several of these factories for his Made in Massachusetts
Concord Foods produces iconic pantry staples
A number of familiar supermarket staples fly down the production lines at Concord Foods in Massachusetts.
Concord Foods was founded in 1968 by Jeff Neville and has since expanded to a vast variety of products for the food service industry — so much so that the massive footprint of this plant is more than 250,000 square feet and is spread out over 16 acres in the west side of Brockton.
One extremely popular retail item made at Concord Foods is Chiquita Banana Bread Mix — the No. 1 brand sold in the United States. They produce 70 packets a minute and 3,000 cases of the product per day.
Supplying pasta for your favorite restaurants
Inside their massive 200,000-square-foot industrial kitchen in Haverhill, Joseph’s Gourmet Pasta produces millions of pounds of pasta for most of the major food distributors all across the U.S. and Canada.
From fettuccini nests to tortellini and stuffed ravioli, Joseph’s is the leading filled-pasta supplier to the food service trade in the entire country.
“We sell to large chains like a lot of different restaurant chains, any Italian chain you can imagine we sell products to them,” Joseph’s CEO David Zwartendijk said.
Making millions of convenient food items every year
Tucked inside the intersection of the Massachusetts Turnpike and Interstate 495 in Westborough, you’ll find the massive world headquarters of a New England favorite: Cumberland Farms, which is also affectionately known as Cumby’s.
What started in 1938 with a one-cow farm has grown to more than 1,500 locations across 30 states. A few years ago, Cumberland Farms was acquired by EG America.
Members of the production team in Westborough make 24 million food items every year. As many as 2 million 14-inch frozen pizzas are among the items.
