New Horizon Cuisine, a company that makes organic soups, broths and vegetable stocks for the food service industry, plans to build a new manufacturing facility in Ankeny, allowing it to increase production and add jobs to meet growing demand, the company’s general manager said.

The company currently operates out of a 15,000-square-foot building, of which only about 3,500 square feet is production space with one production line. The majority of the building, at 1430 SE Cortina Drive in Ankeny, is used for storage.

New Horizon Cuisine plans to build a 30,000-square-foot building on a site it recently purchased at 7405 SE Northstar Drive near the intersection of Corporate Woods Drive and Southeast Four Mile Drive.

The project will allow the company to add two production lines and 11 employees over the next three years. It will also allow New Horizon Cuisine to have its own freezer, cooler and storage, spaces it has had to rent from an adjacent business, which is also growing.

The company currently runs six days a week and once the expansion is complete, it could eventually expand to seven days a week with employment of up to 35 people, said Jake Gretz, New Horizon Cuisine’s general manager.

“I see that in our future,” he said. “I could see us heading in that direction.”

Gretz said New Horizon’s potential to expand is limited in its current location.

“We’re pretty much capped,” he said. “We can’t do much more and we turn away business and we don’t like that. So, we purchased some land last fall and have been working diligently to move some dirt this fall and get it built by the end of next year.”

The Ankeny City Council approved a development agreement with New Horizon Cuisine at its meeting on Monday.

According to a staff report, the cost of the project is estimated at $10 million.

The city has negotiated a five-year property tax rebate package that equals 85% of the Tax Increment Finance eligible amount of taxes paid on the value of the improvements not to exceed $380,000.

The Iowa Economic Development Authority is scheduled to consider an incentive package for New Horizon at its meeting on Friday, Sept. 19.

New Horizon makes concentrated meat and vegetable extracts, industrial bases and flavors from scratch for food manufacturers and food service professionals, including professional chefs in commercial kitchens. Most of its customers are from out of state.

Their products are found in stores such as Walmart and Whole Foods, and the company sells to cruise lines and airlines, too, Gretz said.

New Horizon is also exploring exporting its products overseas and is working with partners to export its products to New Zealand and Australia, he said.

Gretz said despite looking at other communities, the company kept coming back to Ankeny for its expansion.

“My goal was to always stay in Ankeny,” said Gretz, who lives in Ankeny. “It’s where we are. It’s where we built this and I didn’t see any reason to go running off somewhere else. The land we purchased, I’ve been watching it for a few years. It was my high-level target, but I wanted to do my due diligence. We did look around but I kept coming back to that location.”

He said several of the company’s employees also live in Ankeny, which he described as a “good community to operate it.”

Gretz said the location of the new facility is also geographically attractive with easy access to interstate highways.

Derek Lord, economic development director for Ankeny, called New Horizon a “success story.”

The company started from scratch with no customers 13 years ago, he said.

“It has slowly grown to the point they are almost tripling in size,” Lord said. “It’s been awesome to see them incrementally grow over the past 12 years to the point now they’re making a significant investment in the community and hiring a lot of people.”

Lord said the expansion is an example of the growing consumable food production industry in Ankeny.

“Consumable food production and distribution make up about 8% of the total jobs in Ankeny, so it’s a significant industry cluster,” he said. “It’s a growing segment of our economy and it’s also economically resilient in terms of the ups and downs of the overall, broader economy.”