H. J. Heinz varieties first went on sale in Fortnum & Mason in 1886. After World War I, with a headquarters established in Hayes, London, Heinz started exporting Baked Beans, Spaghetti and Tomato Ketchup to the United Kingdom. Heinz opened its first UK production facility in Harlesden in the 1920s. During World War II this facility was bombed twice, resulting in the takeover after the war of the former munitions factory at Standish near Wigan in 1946 to allow the restart of food production.
Opening
Needing a new consolidated factory outside London, the site in Northwest England was chosen due to its ease of access to both the UK agricultural industry, as well as the Atlantic Ocean and Europe via the North Sea, to allow for easy and low-cost access of both raw product and the export of manufactured processed food. The Kitt Green factory was opened on 21 May 1959 by the Lord Chancellor, the Rt. Hon. David Maxwell Fyfe, 1st Earl of Kilmuir. A few weeks later it was visited by Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother on 24 June 1959.
Operations
As the chosen site allowed easy expansion. By the 1980s, the factory employed around 3,000 people, and had taken over the production of all UK products from Harlesden except Heinz Tomato Ketchup. After Harlesden closed in 2000, this has since also been produced at Kitt Green. A steam plant with a capacity of 140 tonnes per hour was installed in 2005. The factory celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2009, with a visit by HM Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh who also opened a new packaging hall. As of 2018, it employs 850 people, the factory makes 1.5–3 million cans of Heinz Baked Beans per day, and more than 1 billion cans a year of their product range overall, amounting to 383 thousand tonnes. It is the largest food processing plant in Europe and the largest of Heinz's factories around the world. In 2013, the factory was listed by Discovery Channel as one of the world’s top five manufacturing units, alongside: Reliance’s Jamnagar Refinery; Volkswagen‘s car plant; NASA’s Kennedy Space Center; POSCO's steel plant.
