Apetito has begun construction of its £100 million Kitchen West production facility in Trowbridge, moving the project from planning and site preparation into the main build phase as the food manufacturer adds capacity alongside its existing Canal Road operation.
The approximately 20,000 sq m facility is being developed on the Canal Road Industrial Estate and is intended to increase production capability and operational resilience for Apetito and Wiltshire Farm Foods. Planning permission was secured in April after the company had already spent much of the previous year clearing and preparing the site.
The start of construction is therefore a distinct industrial milestone rather than a repeat of the earlier planning decision. Apetito has publicly discussed Kitchen West since 2025, but the project has now reached the stage where building structure, utilities, production services, and ultimately manufacturing equipment have to be delivered around a live neighbouring food operation.
The design combines added output with environmental measures intended to reduce the impact of the new factory. A multi-million-pound solar photovoltaic installation is expected to provide around 20% of the facility’s total energy needs, while lower-embodied-carbon steel and concrete are being prioritised within the construction programme.
The development is also targeting a 25% biodiversity net gain. Earlier site-preparation work focused on deconstructing existing buildings and retaining or repurposing materials where practical, including the donation of almost 200 solar panels from the former site to a community-energy project in London.
Ian Stone, chief executive of Apetito and Wiltshire Farm Foods, said breaking ground at Kitchen West marked “a significant milestone” in the company’s investment programme. Apetito says the additional plant is required because its existing Canal Road production base is no longer large enough on its own to meet anticipated meal volumes.
That capacity problem has a particular operational character in prepared-food manufacturing. Apetito supplies healthcare, care homes, education, and social-care customers, while Wiltshire Farm Foods supplies frozen meals directly to consumers, creating demand for a broad range of recipes, dietary specifications, portion formats, and production schedules.
Increasing output therefore involves more than adding floor space or another cooking line. Raw-material intake, chilled and frozen storage, preparation, cooking, portioning, packaging, inspection, refrigeration, cleaning, drainage, warehousing, and dispatch all have to be balanced so that one expanded stage does not simply move the bottleneck elsewhere.
The company’s current recruitment material confirms that engineering teams will be involved in specification, assessment, and commissioning of new plant, processes, and equipment as the factory progresses. That work will become increasingly important once the building envelope is complete and the project moves into production-line installation.
Food factories are also unusually demanding buildings from a utilities perspective. Refrigeration, freezing, process heat, ventilation, hot water, hygiene systems, compressed air, and cleaning can create substantial and relatively continuous energy loads, while production zoning and food-safety controls constrain how equipment and people can move through the site.
Solar PV supplying around a fifth of total energy needs will therefore make a measurable contribution without removing the factory’s underlying dependence on reliable utilities. The eventual energy balance will depend on operating hours, installed generation, production load profiles, refrigeration demand, and the way electricity consumption coincides with solar output.
The use of lower-carbon structural materials tackles a different part of the project footprint. Steel and concrete can account for a significant share of embodied emissions in a large industrial building, meaning design and procurement decisions made during construction affect the carbon position before the first production line starts.
Kitchen West is being built next to an existing operation that will remain active. That avoids the disruption of transferring the entire manufacturing base to another town, but it creates its own project-management constraints as contractors, deliveries, utilities work, commissioning teams, and future production equipment operate alongside an established food site.
Apetito employs around 670 people in Trowbridge and has repeatedly linked the investment to retaining manufacturing skills in the town. The wider UK workforce is around 2,000, making the new plant a significant commitment to an existing regional base rather than a small satellite operation.
The factory’s eventual production configuration will determine how much additional resilience it actually creates. Spare capacity can give manufacturers greater flexibility around maintenance, changing menus, demand peaks, and equipment failures, but only if supporting processes such as chilling, packaging, storage, and dispatch are designed with corresponding headroom.
Construction beginning now puts those engineering decisions on a firmer timetable. The project has passed consultation, planning, clearance, and deconstruction; the next meaningful evidence will come from equipment installation, utilities commissioning, and the point at which Kitchen West can produce at commercial rates alongside the existing Trowbridge kitchens.
