PepsiCo announces a £24m investment in Lincoln factory to meet Quavers demand

PepsiCo has announced an investment of £24 million in its Lincoln factory to upgrade facilities to meet the growing consumer demand for its Quavers snacks.

The investment will see existing machinery at the long-standing city centre site replaced by new equipment, including a compact packaging machine.

Now bought by nearly one in three households in the UK, the investment will increase capacity at the factory, producing more Quavers to help satisfy this demand, as well as make space for new production lines.

The development follows the company’s multimillion-pound investment in its Skelmersdale and Coventry Walkers factories to install specialist compact packaging machinery, leading to a 30 per cent reduction in outer packaging on average across snacks multipacks. The new equipment at Lincoln will help remove even more packaging from the supply chain, PepsiCo said.

“We’ve always had a strong heritage in the Midlands, providing jobs to almost 2,000 people in the region across our factories in Lincoln, Leicester and Coventry. For decades, our Lincoln factory has brought much-loved Quavers snacks to consumers up and down the country, and with this state-of-the-art technology, we’re confident that the site will continue to serve the nation for many years to come,” Nigel Beilby, Lincoln site operations manager, said.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng welcomed the investment that will secure the listed building’s future.

“It’s brilliant to see PepsiCo doubling-down on its commitment to Lincoln through this significant investment in the city centre factory Walkers has called home for more than half a century,” he said.

“This investment will help to deliver on our plan to spread opportunity across the Midlands by future-proofing the jobs of the factory’s outstanding employees by training them to use state of the art equipment, and further bolstering the workforce through their apprenticeship scheme.”

Alongside the Lincoln investment, over £1 million has been committed to the Walkers’ Coventry factory – which produces popular snacks such as Doritos, Wotsits, French Fries, Squares, Sunbites and Cheetos – for additional equipment to maintain production during the work at Lincoln.

The new equipment will be installed at Lincoln in mid-2022, with initial work now underway.