Our future supply of ice cream seems to be in good shape. The Washington Post reports that Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream Holdings, Inc. recently opened a remodeled plant in Laurel, Maryland. The company manufactures the popular Haagen-Dazs, Edy’s and Nestle ice creams.
The plant is large enough to cover more than 14 football fields, churn out 58 million gallons of ice cream a year and supply the entire eastern half of the United States with pints of Haagen-Dazs.
During the past two years, the Oakland, Calif., company invested $210 million into expanding a small ice cream-making facility in Laurel and creating one of the largest ice cream plants in the world. To make space for the growth, Dreyer’s purchased an adjacent 32-acre mobile home park, chipped in to buy out the tenants, and even found homes for some 50 feral cats on the property.
That plant, which is six times bigger than the original, can store enough milk to fill 10 Olympic-size pools. And it has added five ice cream production lines to its previous six, and plans to add nine more.