Baking & Snack - December 2024 - 26

ROTELLA'S ITALIAN BAKERY
Stone from the original
building of Rotella's
Italian Bakery - that
Founder Alessandro
Rotella laid himself -
is on display at Rotella's
Cold Storage. It reminds
Lou Rotella III (left) and
John Rotella of their
family legacy.
with the new bakery being built across the street, they
worked with the county to run fiber underground, which
will eventually connect the two facilities and streamline
their data storage and software systems.
Today, there are still some Rotella products at thirdparty
facilities, and the company is slowly diminishing
that inventory. John Rotella anticipates the cold storage
facility will serve as the company's only cold storage by
January 2025. Everything is already planned for phase
two, building the second facility to expand when needed.
John Rotella estimated that it could be ready to go in
four months if needed.
Pushing the limits of baking
At the heart the Rotellas are bakers, and meeting customer
demands is still top priority. That fueled the need
to expand into cold storage, but it has also led to building
a new bakery. The main campus' capacity is tapped
at two 12-hour shifts, seven days a week.
" We can't afford to shut down for weeks at a time at
our current campus to make major capital improvements
over there, so we decided to build a new facility, "
John Rotella said.
Starting a new capital project at Rotella's involves
every department in the company, Lou Rotella III explained.
The team assesses the company's needs and the
best plan for ensuring those needs are met.
" Then we turn the reins over to John to get to work
and build his vision, " he said, indicating the trust he and
the rest of the team have in John Rotella's ability.
In this case, Rotella's had several acres on its main
campus for building a new bakery, but John Rotella believed
that the company needed to look off-site to set it26
Baking & Snack December 2024 / www.bakingbusiness.com
self up for long-term growth and success.
" I wanted to do it off-site because I wanted to make
things larger than anticipated, " he said. " If you're going
to build it, you might as well build it as efficiently as possible
and have room to grow. "
The timing was perfect, he continued, as a developer
was working on manufacturing and warehouse
space right across the street from the company's cold
storage site. Currently, Rotella's is working with the
developer to install the utilities needed to support the
261,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility that will sit
on the stretch of dirt in just 16 months.
John Rotella and his team of engineers have already
designed the facility's production flow and chosen
equipment suppliers with the help of Dunbar Systems, a
trusted baker-supplier relationship that goes back to Lou
Rotella Sr. and George Dunbar.
The first phase of the project will see two lines installed:
one for bread and one for buns for more capacity
for customers. The second phase will see a third production
line added, either for bakery products or added capacity
for Ag Alchemy, whichever is needed at the time.
John Rotella anticipates there will be some time between
phases one and two as he pivots to capital improvements
on the main campus.
The vision of this new facility is a bakery that is highly
automated, efficient and streamlined to handle longer
production runs for high throughput. The main campus
will be home base for the company's flexible production
for the wide variety of products that customers request.
" Every single new capital expenditure that we've had
is so much more efficient than the last, " Lou Rotella III
said. " From a workforce standpoint, some of the jobs
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Baking & Snack - December 2024

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