IN Brief:
- More than £100m is being invested in the 20,000 sq m Kitchen West production facility.
- Solar PV is expected to meet around 20% of demand, alongside lower-carbon construction materials.
- Existing Canal Road kitchens will remain operational alongside the new manufacturing capacity.
apetito has started construction of its £100m-plus Kitchen West production facility in Trowbridge, moving one of the UK’s larger current prepared-meal manufacturing investments from planning into delivery. The 20,000 sq m development on the Canal Road Industrial Estate is intended to add production capacity, capability, and resilience alongside the company’s existing kitchens as demand grows across healthcare, care, education, and home-delivered meals.
The project secured planning permission from Wiltshire Council in April 2026, less than a year after the application was submitted. That approval established the development framework for Kitchen West; the start of construction now brings building, utilities, production systems, hygiene controls, logistics, and commissioning into a single delivery programme while existing operations continue nearby.
Kitchen West has been designed around apetito’s production requirements rather than as a generic industrial shell. The company says the additional facility will provide headroom for future demand while strengthening operational resilience, particularly across institutional and care markets where product consistency, nutritional specifications, allergen controls, and delivery reliability are central to service performance.
A multi-million-pound solar photovoltaic installation is expected to generate about 20% of the facility’s total energy requirement, while lower-carbon steel and concrete are being prioritised during construction. The development is also targeting a 25% biodiversity net gain and forms part of apetito’s wider commitment to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2040.
Food factories carry heavy electrical and thermal loads across cooking, chilling, freezing, ventilation, cleaning, refrigeration, compressed air, warehousing, and utilities. Supplying around a fifth of expected demand from on-site solar generation will not remove exposure to purchased electricity, but it can reduce grid dependence during daylight production periods and give the site some protection from power-price volatility.
Construction choices are being treated in similar terms. Site preparation has included deconstruction and reuse of materials from existing buildings where feasible, while the new-build specification favours lower embodied-carbon materials. Some of the project’s emissions work is therefore being locked into the asset before production starts, rather than left entirely to future operating efficiencies.
Ian Stone, chief executive of apetito, said Kitchen West would “strengthen our ability to meet growing customer demand”. The statement sits alongside a more consequential operating decision: apetito’s existing Mill Site kitchens on Canal Road are expected to remain in use after the new facility opens. Kitchen West is therefore being developed as additional manufacturing capacity rather than a straightforward replacement plant.
Running the sites in parallel should provide more options for allocating products, processes, maintenance windows, and future growth, although it makes commissioning more demanding. New food factories become productive only after production equipment is installed and validated, utilities are balanced, cleaning regimes are proven, food-safety controls are embedded, and staff are trained. Those activities have to be completed without compromising supply from the neighbouring operation.
apetito has already been recruiting around health, safety, and environmental management for the construction phase, with responsibilities extending into the specification, assessment, and commissioning of future plant, processes, and equipment. That work connects the building programme directly to the eventual operating model, rather than treating the production lines as a late addition to a completed shell.
The company has an established workforce and manufacturing base in Trowbridge. At the planning stage, apetito said around 670 of its roughly 2,000 UK employees were based locally, making it the town’s largest private employer. Expanding on the same industrial estate retains access to production knowledge, engineering support, supervision, and established supply arrangements that would take time to reproduce at a separate greenfield location.
A purpose-designed plant also provides an opportunity to reconsider process layout before equipment positions become fixed. Raw and cooked flows can be separated more deliberately, internal movements shortened, utility monitoring built into the infrastructure, and maintenance access considered before lines are installed. Legacy factories can make each of those changes expensive once services and production commitments have accumulated around them.
Earlier project information indicated that Kitchen West was expected to become operational in 2027. The critical milestones now move into equipment selection, hygienic design, utility efficiency, installation, process validation, and controlled ramp-up. Maintaining output from the existing kitchens while contractors and engineering teams prepare the new site will make sequencing as important as construction speed. With construction under way, the £100m commitment is no longer an approved plan on paper; it is a live manufacturing project with a commissioning deadline.
