Bakery, spurned in Ohio, off to Indiana

Skally’s Old World Bakery, a family-owned bagel and pita bread bakery that tried to move to and expand in suburban Cincinnati, Tuesday said it was building a new production facility in an Indiana border town.

The new plant will open in 2017 and will create up to 150 new high-wage jobs by 2021.

The shift from Southwest Ohio to Southeast Indiana came after the company withdrew its Liberty Township proposal in the face of residents' opposition.

“I’m excited to welcome Skally’s Old World Bakery to the Hoosier State,” said Indiana Gov. Mike Pence in a news release. "Like this family-owned business, Indiana was built on shared values of tradition, quality and hard work, and it’s our strong Hoosier workforce that helps Indiana stand out as the ideal place to do business."

Skally’s Old World Bakery will invest $40 million to construct and equip a 350,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art production facility in West Harrison, Ind., which will house a bread production line serving customers in 40 states. The building, which will be located along Interstate 74 at the U.S. 52 exit, will complement the company’s existing two-story 42,000-square-foot facility in North College Hill.

The company, which currently employs 96 associates, plans to begin construction in March. The bakery anticipates hiring for production line, quality assurance and information technology positions in 2017.

“The Skally family is excited at the opportunity to take our family business to Dearborn County, expanding operations and creating new jobs in West Harrison, Indiana,” said Ephraim Skally, founder and chief executive officer of Skally’s Old World Bakery, in the release.

The Skally family founded Old World Bakery in 1977 in a 17-foot-wide, 1,275-square-foot bakery. The bakery originally focused on pita bread and added a bagel line in 1981. The bakery has since grown, now baking and packaging 24,000 bagels and 10,000 loaves of pita every hour to ship to customers across the country.

The Indiana Economic Development Corp. offered Skally’s up to $900,000 in conditional tax credits based on the company’s job creation plans. These incentives are performance-based, meaning until Hoosiers are hired, the company is not eligible to claim incentives. The county will offer additional incentives at the request of Dearborn County Redevelopment Commission.

“Based on its location, ease of build, and infrastructure assets, the site for the Skally’s project is one of the most premier manufacturing sites in the unincorporated portion of our county, said Shane McHenry, president of the Dearborn County Board of Commissioners. “We value long term commitments and were looking for a community-minded employer. It was an added bonus that they, similar to our recent Whitewater Mill project, are a business of several generations with a long tradition of quality. Just great people who want to be great neighbors and mirror our values as a community.”

Last month, hours before what was expected to be one of the largest zoning committee meetings in the history of fast-growing Liberty Township, a plan to build a similar plant there were withdrawn.

The Liberty Township proposal would have put a 387,0000-square-foot bakery on a 51.5-acre plot bordered by Interstate 75 on the west, Millikin Road on the north and Princeton Road along the parcel's southern border.

The site, now farmland, is less than 1,000 feet from the upscale Trails of Four Bridges subdivision. More than 1,000 residents from the neighborhood and others nearby had signed an online petition in opposition to the plan. Some objected to potential truck traffic on narrow roads; others didn't want the smells from the bakery or its 24-hour operation.

Enquirer archives contributed.