At the heart the Rotellas are bakers, and meeting customer demands is still top priority. That fueled Omaha, Neb.-based Rotella’s Italian Bakery’s 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, general manager, said.

Starting a new capital project at Rotella’s involves every department in the company, Lou Rotella III, chief operating officer, 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 itself 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 may become a bit easier and allow people to really focus on the quality of the product.”

This article is an excerpt from the December 2024 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Rotella's Italian Bakery, click here.