Haribo’s now open gummi bear manufacturing facility in Pleasant Prairie is a project over six years in the making that’s faced several delays.
The company originally announced plans for a plant in Pleasant Prairie in March 2017. The company did not break ground for the plant until late 2020. It’s because of these delays that Haribo’s original $21 million tax incentive agreement with the
WEDC has been amended three times.
The first amendment, completed in 2018, adjusted the timeline for the company to make its required investments by two years. Under the original deal, Haribo needed to have 80 jobs by the end of 2020 and would have exhausted its $15.3 million in capital expenditure tax credits by the end of 2019.
The second amendment, completed in late 2019, actually gave Haribo the opportunity to earn another $1.5 million in tax credits after the company added a 160,000-square-foot warehouse to its plans. The additional building added $19.6 million to the company’s planned investment.
The third and most recent amendment, approved last May, extended Haribo’s ability to earn tax credits from 2027 to 2028 to address delays in the project, according to a WEDC spokesperson.
At the end of quarter three for fiscal year 2023, WEDC data shows Haribo had already been verified for $8.62 million in tax credits. The actual capital investment made at that same point in time was $148,505,070 while planned capital investment for the entire project is $239,603,080. As of
last week, the company said there were 200 employees working at the 500,000-square-foot factory.
Haribo's Pleasant Prairie facility is a multi-phase project. The first phase includes the recently opened production facility, an administrative building and a warehouse. Future phases are in development and will include new technology, more capacity and hundreds of additional employees.
Those future phases could bring employment at the complex to more than 1,200. Haribo has not specified by what date the full buildout of the campus will be completed. The company plans to produce 132 million pounds of gummi candies each year now that phase one of the facility is complete.
