Romeoville Pizza Kitchen
The Harold News - Member of the Sun-Times News Group
ROMEOVILLE – The deli pizza production line at Great Kitchens Inc. looks like something out of a Willie Wonka movie set.
Colorful tubes descending from the sky are attached to gleaming stainless steel metal contraptions that crank out pizzas at virtually the speed of light.
The high-tech manufacturing plant isn’t fantasy. It’s a wonderful reality for the company and Romeoville, officials said at a ribbon cutting and tour Tuesday.
Great Kitchens, one of North America’s biggest private label pizza suppliers, began production at its new 155,000-square-foot building in the Southcreek Corporate Center recently. The company expects to be able to produce 100 cheese or pepperoni pizzas a minute once its up to full capacity next spring.
Complicated pizzas with more ingredients will come out a bit slower but still at around 60 pies per minute.
The company will slowly phase out production at its smaller Addison plant over the next several months, said Great Kitchens CEO Dennis Malchow.
No. 1 product Great Kitchens, which is owned by Arbor Investments, makes “take and bake” pizzas for a wide variety of clients ranging from the massive Wal-Mart, Target and Meijer chains to specialty stores such as Trader Joe’s.
The pizzas come in all sizes, from mini to deep dish and are sold under private labels in the deli case. Consumers cook them at home.
“Our pizza looks like it came from a pizzeria,” Malchow said.
Pizza flavors range from simple cheese to Thai chicken, Margherita and carne asada. The company also makes a wide range of appetizers including potato skins, puff pastry bites, bread bowls and bruschetta.
Now that it has a larger, state-of-of the art facility, the company may try to get a slice of the frozen pizza market as well, Malchow said.
“Pizza has displaced hamburgers as the No. 1 product,” he said. “Pizzas are a big part of the American diet.”
‘Dream come true’ When based in Addison, the company was spread out over several locations. Now, all of the production, warehouse and office components are under one roof at the Romeoville site, which is north of Airport Road and east of Weber Road.
“It’s a dream come true for us,” Malchow said of the new facility. “We can control our destiny now.”
Company officials love the fact that the business park is close to Interstate 55 and that the price of land was affordable, Malchow said. Landing the company was a coup for Romeoville, which is working hard to cut down on warehouses and beef up manufacturing and retail growth.
The building is unique in that it has a 50,000-square-foot freezer to store the completed product. Creating the big freezer and the huge production line pushed the cost of the building up, said Mark Carlson of Carlson Brothers Inc. construction company, which built Great Kitchens. A warehouse costs $35 to $40 to construct. The Great Kitchens building cost $120 a square foot, he said.
The building also features a $1.5 million water filtration plant required by the village to protect Romeoville’s water system from pizza ingredient runoff.
“That little facility there brings a smile to our director of public work’s face,” Kirk Openchowski, the village’s finance director, said while viewing the facility through a window in the company’s corporate offices.
Economic pizza Great Kitchens has 300 employees. About 10 percent are office workers. The building also includes a research and development kitchen where corporate executive chef Joseph O’Connor creates unique doughy creations for clients.
O’Connor said his Romeoville quarters are “dramatically different” than the ones he left in Addison, which were a quarter the size.
“We moved from the front of a warehouse to our own dedicated space,” he said.
O’Connor, who has a degree from the Culinary Institute of America in New York, said he loves whipping up new recipes for the company’s take-and-bake pizza line.
“You’re always trying to do something outside of the box,” he said. “And this economy is really driving a lot of people to this product. You can fill up your family for under $10.”
For more information, go to www.gkitchens.com