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Sports juice softens slowdown for Lincoln bottler Company’s product switch save jobs, improves outlook, and brings a new brand name to town By DIANE TURBYFILL, LTN Staff Writer Jan. 25, 2002 - A sweet aroma wafts through National Fruit Product Company’s Lincoln plant, but it’s not the same fragrance as when the plant opened 28 years ago. And that’s likely a surprise to many in Lincoln County. Tucked off of U.S. 321 Business on White House Road, the 97-acre National Fruit plant — long known for its White House brand apple products — is a leading bottler of Gatorade. The switch from apple juice to jock juice was spurred by a slump in Lincoln County apple production and an over-all change in company makeup. “In 1998, National Fruit restructured,” says L.D. Shockley, director of the Lincoln plant. That was eight years after the Lincoln plant began filling bottle with Gatorade. It’s been tough recovery. “We laid off two-thirds of our employees,” Shockley says, “lots of good, long term employees.” Sixty-two people are now employed at the plant where 148 employees once worked, some have been there since it opened, many making the transition from manufacturing apples to bottling Gatorade. “It’s like a big family,” says Shockley. The addition of Gatorade has tended to stabilize the plant’s operating schedule, which fluctuated with the growing season, he says. “We were like a lot of other fruit processors, when apples would come in the fall, we would work six days a week. It was a very seasonal business.” Usually, the company would have to layoff workers during spring and summer. “Now we’re running Gatorade year-round,” Shockley says. And, during the past few years, the company has been able to gradually increase its number of employees. But even Gatorade has its seasonal ups and downs: production of the fruit-flavored sports drink increases during the summer, causing the Lincolnton plant to expand its six-day-a-week operation to seven. This year, the plant will begin a seven-day-a-week operation in February, three months sooner than ever before. Large tankers deliver Gatorade to the plant for bottling. The drink is transferred to inside holding tanks. Bottles traveling along conveyor belts are filled, labeled and capped in the plant, before shipment to Pennsylvania and Atlanta distribution. The Lincolnton plant bottles 11-1/2 million gallons of Gatorade annually. “During the summer we’ll send out 15 truck loads a day,” National Fruit Product Company began as Board, Armstrong & Co. in Alexandria, Va. in 1908. The company produces White House brand apple products including cider, juice and vinegars — apple and white distilled — at its corporate headquarters in Winchester, Va. About 1 million gallons of that white distilled vinegar are bottled annually in Lincolnton, where other changes may be in the works. Pepsi Co. recently acquired Gatorade producer, The Quaker Oats Co. Shockley is hopeful that this will bring a wider variety of products to the plant which is not equipped to bottle sodas. “With the acquisition by Pepsi, there are other non-carbonated drinks,” he says. The plant director envisions a wide array of opportunities ahead. “We would like to put in a second bottling line which would allow us to bottle more than we ever have before,” he says, “and as our business grows, that is definitely a possibility.”
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© 2001 Lincoln Times-News |
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