Nestlé has announced a €102m investment in a coffee production facility in Spain, which is set to become the company’s largest inside Europe.
The investment will pay for the replacement of a production line at the Nescafé factory in Girona, 50 miles northeast of Barcelona. The new line will take up 10,000 square feet of the existing 200,000 square-foot site, making it the Swiss producer’s largest in Europe and third largest in the world by the end of 2017.
The announcement follows a €44m investment last year, which brought the total amount invested in the site to €236m.
The capacity of the plant will increase from 21,000 tons to 30,000 tons every year, producing instant coffee for export to the European and Middle Eastern markets. The expansion will lead to between 30 and 40 additional jobs, Spanish newspaper El País reported.
Nestlé technical director Miquel Serra said: “The production of the new plant will go abroad. Today, Girona exports 74% of what it produces to more than 70 countries. With the new facility, we enter new countries in Europe and probably the Middle East.”
Despite investing heavily in infrastructure, Nestlé has had to heighten its efforts to preserve market share over the last 12 months. The firm’s CEO, Laurent Dereux, hoped that improvements in the global economy would lead to better market conditions: “It’s been a difficult year,” he said, “where the market has not grown and the company has had to enter into a price war to retain customers. We hope that the economic recovery reaches the consumer’s pocket.”
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