The
Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. staff review for
Kikkoman’s expansion project offers new details on the company’s plans in the state.
Osamu Mogi, representative director, senior executive corporate office with Kikkoman Corp.,
told BizTimes earlier this week that the company considered 64 Midwest locations before picking Jefferson.
The WEDC staff review details just how close one of those other locations came to winning the project.
“Kikkoman had a site under contract in Ohio that was shovel ready and required less infrastructure improvements,” the WEDC staff review says.
WEDC is offering Kikkoman up to $15.5 million in tax credits to support the project, which includes a new facility in Jefferson and investment in the company’s Walworth plant.
Most of those incentives – $14.4 million – are for capital investments the company plans to make. Kikkoman’s plans call for $563 million in spending for Jefferson and another $237 million in Walworth.
The state incentives do offer $1.1 million in tax credits for the creation of 83 new jobs. Kikkoman currently has around 200 employees at the Walworth plant, according to the WEDC staff review. The planned new jobs have an average starting wage of $28.39, according to the WEDC documents. They cover a range of positions in production, pressing and refining, bottling, warehouse, engineering and maintenance, quality control, and office and management roles.
Bottling staff is the role with the most new positions at 22. That job has an average starting wage of $22.90. Another 13 jobs are as pressing/refining staff and nine more are as production staff. Both those roles come with a $22.90 per hour wage was well.
The highest paying roles are the two management positions with an average wage of $75 per hour, the same wage paid for the engineering and maintenance manager. The production manager role has a $69.02 starting wage while the bottling manager is projected to make $60 per hour and the office manager would make $55 per hour.
