Delaware County officials ceremonially broke ground on an aluminum can manufacturing facility that will soon be the county’s largest manufacturer.  As IPR’s Stephanie Wiechmann reports,

“You look at the facility – 862,000 square feet.  That’s big.  You look at the number of jobs, you look at their investment.  It’s big.”

Muncie Mayor Dan Ridenour, along with Governor Eric Holcomb, summed up Polish-owned CanPack’s investment in Delaware County.  First announced in May, the company will spend $380 million to build a new facility on the corner of Fuson and Cowan roads.  It will manufacture aluminum cans for beer and other beverages.

“Over 340 new – not just jobs.  These are careers for our Hoosier families.”

Read More: Aluminum Can Manufacturer To Build Large Facility In Delaware County, Bringing Over 300 Jobs

CanPack Regional Manager Tom Johnson says once the building is completed and staffed this summer, 3.6 billion cans a year will roll out of the facility.  Johnson says the company will begin hiring for all jobs in the middle of next year and the process will take about a year.

“We consider, I would say, 90-95 percent of our jobs in the plant to be skilled positions.  We don’t have any assembly work or any type of work that requires a lot of manual [labor].  A lot of our folks are operating machinery, or we have a lot of automated equipment that needs to be taken care of, a lot of quality control.”

Workers will train at CanPack’s other US facility in Pennsylvania on “live, running equipment.”

Johnson says this year’s US can market is expected to be 20 million cans short of demand.