The Italian Italpizza has bought the Buitoni factory in Caudry (North), implicated in the health scandal of contaminated pizzas and which Nestlé had announced would close in March 2023, Agence France-Presse learned from the two groups, Monday February 5. The Italian company specializing in the production of frozen pizzas assured, in a press release, that he had signed on 1er February the deed of purchase of the factory.
Italpizza, which plans to restart production in the fall, plans more than twelve million euros of investment by 2028 to modernize the site. The group wishes to hire, before the end of 2028, “around 140 employees”. In July 2023, the factory management and the unions signed an employment protection plan (PSE) concerning the approximately one hundred and twenty employees on the site, whose cessation of activity had been announced for December 31.
Nestlé, which had justified the closure by the fall in sales, emphasizes having offered each employee “at least one reclassification offer within the group” and identified “more than two hundred job offers to be filled externally (…) within a radius of 50 kilometers around the factory ».
“A solid group”, considers the mayor of Caudry
The various right-wing mayor of Caudry, Frédéric Bricout, welcomed on Monday the resumption of the site by “a family business, a solid group”. According to him, Italpizza assured that he was “in the logic of things” to give priority to former Nestlé employees, rather than looking for new employees elsewhere. Still according to Mr. Bricout, around 90 former employees of the factory remained on the job at the end of November 2023.
The location of the Caudry factory should allow Italpizza to “get closer to fast-growing Northern European markets”, welcomes the president of the group, Cristian Pederzini, quoted in the press release. With a production capacity of 435 million pizzas per year, Italpizza employs 1,700 people and generates a turnover “around 400 million euros, 60% of which on foreign markets spread across sixty countries”it is summarized in the press release.
In operation since 1982, the Caudry factory manufactured Fraîch’up frozen raw pizzas, suspected of having been the cause of the death of two children and of having poisoned dozens of others with the bacteria. Escherichia coli. Italpizza plans to produce there “exclusively pre-cooked products”.
A judicial investigation has been open since May 2022 in Paris for involuntary homicide in the case of two victims and for involuntary injuries for fourteen others, according to a judicial source. An agreement to compensate the victims, the amount of which has not been disclosed, was signed in spring 2023 by Nestlé.