Just a few months after opening in Whitehall, Cérélia bakery is breaking new ground.

The French commercial baking firm is introducing its own brand, Jus-Rol, in the U.S. Shoppers at Kroger, Meijer and other grocery stores can find Jus-Rol's pizza dough, puff pastry, pie crusts and flatbreads, all manufactured at 430 N. Yearling Road.

The brand launch illustrates the fast growth of the company, which hadn't even started building its Whitehall factory two years ago.

"We are in the ramp-up phase," Chief Operations Officer Claude Le Bourg said on a recent tour through the plant. 

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Cérélia (pronounced se-rel-ee-uh) opened the $29 million factory in September on the site of a former Kroger warehouse. 

While the factory is new, Cérélia actually arrived in Ohio in 2017, when it purchased the English Bay Batter operations a few miles to the northwest, in addition to English Bay operations in Toronto and Vancouver. 

Cérélia wanted to expand and modernize the operations, and built the 160,000-square-foot bakery on Yearling Road in Whitehall, nearly three times the size of the former English Bay factory. 

Cérélia brought a few of the 40 workers from the old plant to the new one, but mostly hired new employees because the jobs were different, said Dominque Lacroix, director of operations and supply chain at the facility.

Today, the bakery employs 121 workers, but Cérélia is looking for another 10 to run a second shift in anticipation of running three shifts at the plant. Ultimately, the company has room to triple in size. 

"We expect to expand, for sure," Le Bourg said. "The timetable, we're not sure, but I'm convinced within the next five years."  

In addition to providing more space and capacity, the new plant allows lines to be strictly segregated into gluten-free dough, pizza dough, puff pastry and pie crust. 

"If you get puffed pastry contaminated with yeast, you get a croissant," Le Bourg quipped. 

The facility is called a bakery, but nothing is baked there. Instead, workers make dough, some for Cérélia's own brands, but mostly for other brands. 

Prime ingredients such as flour and sugar are stored in silos outside the plant and are channeled into each of the rooms where workers — wearing hair nets, gloves and masks — mix them with other ingredients, such as chocolate chips, to customize the dough.

The dough is mixed and packaged before rolling out of the dough rooms on assembly lines to another room, where the packages are bundled for shipping. 

Le Bourg said Cérélia's own Jus-Rol products are based on European recipes and have less sugar than their American counterparts. They include no hydrogenated oil or high-fructose corn syrup. 

While Jus-Rol now offers five products, Le Bourg said the line will expand, part of Cérélia's broader push into North America. 

In addition to acquiring the English Bay operations, Cérélia a year ago bought U.S. Waffle in South Carolina, along with Wewalka’s North American pizza dough business.

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