Dreyer's opens one of the world's largest ice cream plants

27/05/05 Bakersfield, one of California's fastest growing cities, is now home to one of the world's largest ice cream plants. Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream Holdings, Inc., is celebrating the completion of a $100 million expansion of its Bakersfield Operations Center, the company's largest of seven ice cream manufacturing facilities.

BOC will now make more than 100 different Dreyer's and Nestle ice cream products and frozen snacks, including the new Dreyer's Slow Churned(TM) Light ice cream and Dreyer's Dibs(TM), a new bite-sized chocolate-coated ice cream snack available in grocery stores for the first time this month.

In addition to adding six new ice cream manufacturing lines to its previous 19, Dreyer's has also built a 120,000 square-foot, -20 degree Fahrenheit ice cream warehouse, and 20-door distribution center. The five-story warehouse is used to freeze and temporarily store freshly made ice cream before it is loaded onto freezer trucks and shipped to grocery stores, convenience stores, drug stores, and restaurants across the country. Dreyer's expects the Bakersfield plant to dish out nearly 70 million gallons of ice cream and 100 million dozens of frozen snacks a year.

The plant, which has tripled in size and boasts the square footage of 13 football fields, is also the new home of Dreyer's state-of-the-art Technical Center. Its 43 food scientists and staff work to create new products, flavors and breakthrough innovations in ice cream, like the proprietary technology behind Slow Churned Light ice cream, which enables Dreyer's to create an ice cream, which, with only half the fat, tastes as rich and creamy as regular.