London will soon be home to a major pasta production facility, the LEDC announced on Wednesday. Italian pasta maker Andriani S.p.A. plans to build a 50,000-square-foot gluten-free production facility — their first in North America — in London’s Innovation Park. The plant will be up and running in the next year and a half and will support 50 jobs at first. “The fact that Andriani has chosen our city as the future home of its first ever facility in North America is a testament to our industrial land strategy, and just the latest example of our increasingly diverse economy,” said Mayor Josh Morgan.
The upshot: Observers of London’s growth in the agri-food sectors are pointing to this deal as another example of its strength of late. “London has firmly established itself as a leader in food and beverage processing. We now have close to 10,000 people who are employed at over 90 companies within this cluster,” said LEDC president and CEO Kapil Lakhotia. Good news, too, to be landing productive industries as economic headwinds and changing workplace demands in white-collar sectors like tech persist. “We‘ve certainly developed a unique niche and reputation for food and beverage processing,” Lakhotia told Global News. “As you can imagine, every industry cluster is prone to economic cycles, but food tends to be very resilient, and historically, that’s proven to be accurate.”
