Kettle & Fire opens its first company-owned broth plant

Company-owned production

Kettle & Fire has opened KettleWorks, its first company-owned manufacturing facility, at Lancaster's Greenfield development in Pennsylvania. The new 167,000-square-foot building brings processing in-house. The company partnered with High Real Estate Group to establish the facility and expects self-manufacturing to improve service for retailers, distributors and other business partners.

Central Pennsylvania offered an established manufacturing environment, a qualified workforce and logistics and supply-chain advantages, according to the company's location-selection rationale. KettleWorks supports its shelf-stable product portfolio:

• Bone broths.
• Cooking broths.
• Soups.

The opening follows a $43 million secondary buyout led by Colter Ventures. That figure concerns the ownership transaction, rather than a stated construction budget for KettleWorks. The company links the transaction with investment in innovation and supply-chain capabilities. Its expected service improvements remain operating objectives accompanying the move into self-manufacturing.

Earlier retail expansion

Kettle & Fire's earlier growth included a venture-funding round of $16 million in 2018, led by Cavu Consumer Partners. Over the following 18 months, its grocery-store presence expanded from 3,000 locations to 10,000, while sales exceeded $35 million. The product range broadened to include soups alongside broth. These figures relate to that earlier expansion period, before the Lancaster manufacturing opening.

The business first became profitable in 2020. During the following two years it launched at Costco and Walmart. By March 2025, beef and chicken bone broths remained its core products, and the company had added a venison broth through a collaboration with Hawaii-based Maui Nui. Its cooking process used simmering periods of 14 to 20 hours.

A separate chicken-and-beef product line had launched in 2021. The expanding portfolio formed part of the business entering the company-owned manufacturing phase. In March 2025, the private company's estimated valuation was approximately $200 million following the purchase of earlier investors' holdings. That estimate concerned the business as a whole, rather than the value of the new processing building.