Crown Holdings recently announced the closure of two of its plants, one in Warrensburg, just northwest of Decatur, and one in Mississippi, according to published reports.
Approximately 200 workers will lose their jobs.
Crown notified the state of Illinois of the Warrensburg closure, which will affect 40 workers when it closes on March 8, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification notice received by the state on Jan. 19, in an online story on packagingdive.com.
Crown, formerly known as Crown Cork & Seal, operates at plant at 1035 E. North St. in Bradley. The plant employs a unionized workforce of 131 and operates two shifts a day — 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.
In Mississippi, The Panolian newspaper in Batesville, reported Crown is expected to cease production on March 29 at the Batesville facility that opened in 1987, impacting about 150 full-time employees.
According to the story in The Panolian, Panola Partnership CEO Joe Azar said the company invested $15 million in new equipment three years ago, and he said this business decision to close in Batesville was driven by expected growth in the canned water market that had not materialized. He said employees are “being treated well with severance and insurance.”
Crown produces aluminum cans for the beverage industry, including soft drinks and beer.
“Crown has been not just a good corporate partner, but a great partner for Batesville,” Azar said in the story in The Panolian. “For a long time Crown has been the place to work, and you can see that from the low turnover numbers they consistently maintain. Those are high paying jobs, but we are confident that in the end those salaries will be replaced, and more, for these employees.”
In addition, Crown opened plants in Martinsville, Va., in 2021 and in Bowling Green, Ky., in 2020. Those plants have lower costs and greater capacity.
Azar added that the national Green Initiative movement to replace water bottles with water packaged in cans hasn’t been perfected because of the taste of water is unsuitable for customers.
Because the move to cans could not be supported by the bottle water industry, Crown was forced to re-evaluate the cost of maintaining the Batesville facility when the newer plants were capable of greater manufacturing capacity at lower costs, according to The Panolian story.
The Bradley site — known as Crown’s Kankakee No. 24 — originally was a glass and mirror factory dating back to the 1940s. Crown took over the site in 1974 and, after years of making steel beverage cans, has long since been producing aluminum cans for mainly Midwest consumers for close to 50 years.
It’s unsure if the Bradley site will see an increase in production with the closing in Warrensburg and Mississippi.
In addition to the 131 production workers in Bradley, the site also has another 20 administrative and office staff on the 10-acre site.
A Jan. 22 memo to investors from Truist Securities addressing the Mississippi report said that the plant has three lines with capacity of at least 1.5 billion units, accounting for between 1% and 1.5% of total North American capacity, according to the story on packingingdive.com.
“Overall, we view this capacity closure as positive for industry supply-demand dynamics,” wrote senior paper and packaging analyst Michael Roxland, expecting that Crown will “continue to grow volume and share in North America.”