PROVIDENCE – Irish-owned food products supplier Greencore Group PLC announced Tuesday it would “cease” fresh production operations at its facilities in North Kingstown as of March 25, leaving 218 employees out of work.
In the Tuesday statement, Greencore said the closure of the Rhode Island facility is part of a “restructuring” of its U.S. holdings and was being done to address “the operating losses of the site that have continued into FY18.” Local Greencore operations, according to the firm, accounted for roughly 4 percent of its U.S. manufacturing and 2 percent of its fiscal year 2017 pro forma revenue.
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Speaking for the R.I. Department of Labor and Training, Matt Sheaff confirmed with Providence Business News Thursday that 218 of Greencore’s Quonset Business Park-based employees would be laid off and that the company informed DLT of that figure.
Sheaff could not confirm total employment and a Greencore Group spokeswoman told Providence Business News, as of Tuesday, there were roughly 220 employees working at the North Kingstown facility.
A layoff of this size, according to Sheaff, triggered a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification. Federal WARN legislation requires employers of 100 or more full-time workers be given 60 days notice prior to a facility closure or “mass layoff.” The law states that employers of 100-plus full-time workers are impacted by these regulations if they “close a facility or discontinue an operating unit with 50 or more workers,” “lay off 50-499 workers” or at least one-third of the total workforce, and if 500-plus workers are laid off at any single employment site.
On Wednesday, R.I. Commerce Corp.’s homepage linked to a Commerce-produced profile of the Dublin-based company’s history of operations in Rhode Island. As of Thursday morning, that profile was no longer available on the Commerce RI website.
A 50-year lease “that would create nearly 400 new jobs,” according to the Commerce RI website, was approved by the Quonset Development Corp.’s board of directors and signed on March 18, 2014.
The 107,000-square-foot factory is located on a 15-acre plot and is part of the QDC’s Site Readiness program – an effort to make QDC land more attractive by pre-approving permitting and engineering aspects of prospective construction. When it was opened in April 2015, the company’s CEO Liam McClennon called Greencore’s Rhode Island facility at Quonset Business Park North “a state of the art complex,” in which the company had invested more than $40 million.
The profile says the company was “enthused” by incentives at Quonset that “reward longer-term leases and job creation based on payrolls.”
A QDC spokesperson said Greencore, as a land lease tenant, received the following incentives through the organization:
- A 0.5 percent discount on annual wages
- A “sliding scale” discount dependent on the length of the lease
So far Greencore has received lease-based discounts of $30,301, $31,614.83 and $32,928.75 for 2015, 2016 and 2017, respectively. In addition, the company received a wage discount of $27,586.63 in 2017.
After Tuesday’s announcement and per the QDC spokesperson, Greencore will continue to receive incentives for which it is eligible, incentives he added, that any Quonset Business Park tenant is eligible for.
Greencore Group, per its statement, will retain ownership of the North Kingstown facility for “potential repurposing” and therefore will continue to have its lease credited by the QDC.
Regarding the future of the wages incentive, the QDC spokesperson said: “it’s too early to speculate about what the job count will ultimately be there, if any.”
In the now-unavailable Commerce profile, the timeline for the construction of Greencore USA’s Quonset facility was described as less-than-14-months and characterized as, at that time, the “single largest challenge for the state and the Quonset Development Corporation.”
Greencore did not apply for nor receive any Commerce incentives, according to Sheaff.
Tuesday’s announcement comes six months after the announcement by Greencore USA of a listeria bacteria outbreak in the Quonset facility that led to a voluntary recall of egg salad and ham salad sandwiches as well as seafood stuffing in October 2017.
Emily Gowdey-Backus is a staff writer for PBN. You can follow her on Twitter @FlashGowdey or contact her via email, gowdey-backus@pbn.com.
