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THANK YOU MAUI!: Stacks of Spam cans in a Kahului grocery store Wednesday. (Photo by Hannes Johnson on Unsplash)
The mid-size town of Dubuque, Iowa received strong economic news this week ~ thanks in part to Maui grocery shoppers and cooks.
Progressive Processing LLC, a subsidiary of Hormel Foods Corp., announced a $43 million investment for a remodel of its Dubuque facility, and to increase capacity to produce even more cans of its popular meat product Spam.
Officials said they couldn't have done it without the astronomical sales figures coming from the island of Maui the past year.
"We have hoped for this expansion for several years, and we heard that the wonderful folks of Maui helped put it over the top due to their extraordinary consumption of Spam," said Brad Cavanagh, mayor-elect of Dubuque. "These are new jobs our community gets thanks to the millions of cans of Spam that are sold on Maui each year."
"We were concerned that the pandemic might convince some Maui families to try out new canned meat products," said Joseph Schmidt, vice president of sales for Progressive Processing LLC. "But the wonderful people of Maui doubled down, rising Spam sales so significantly that we had to invest to make more Spam for the near future."
The astronomical Spam sales, in fact, have nudged parent company Hormel to look for sites for a potential new Spam production facility on-island. One rumor is a shared facility with the planned new Maui Toyota plant, for its new Tacundra model, at the old sugar mill plant in Puuenene.
"They are seeing what we saw early last year: that Maui residents buy so much of our product that it makes sense to save money on shipping it in, when we could just make it right here," said Toyota spokesman Ichiro Tanaka. "What we plan for the new Tacundra is kind of what Hormel foresees with Spam in Maui: a product here for the long haul."
