Korea’s CJ Foodville expands bakery business in US, to build a bread factory and launch more Tous Les Jours branches

CJ Foodville Corp., the food and food service subsidiary of the CJ Group, is expanding its bakery business in the United States. The company also owns the bakery franchise Tous Les Jours which is the second-largest bakery in South Korea.

CJ Foodville is aiming to build a large-scale factory to bake bread in the U.S., and the company confirmed this plan this week. Currently, the food service firm is searching for a good site and expects to start the construction in 2023, which is the earliest possible schedule.

As per The Korea Times, the company launched Tous Les Jours in the U.S. with the opening of its first bake shop in 2004. Today, the brand is present in 21 states with a total of 82 stores in operation. It was noted that while the number of shops is not really large, the bakery has been earning big profits because the prices of the products are higher - double of rates in Korea.

With the outcome, the branches in the said country turned out to be a profit maker for CJ Foodville. It has been operating overseas since 2018, and among its brands, Tous Les Jours was the first one to give profits since 2018.

"It is CJ Group's keynote to expand its global business and CJ Foodville is planning to do so by establishing a local bakery factory in the United States,” a company official said in a statement. Other than our plan to build a factory there, nothing specific has been decided about it."

Pulse News further reported that CJ Foodville is building a bread factory to meet its goal of expanding its bakery brand in the region by more than 10 times the number of its current outlets by the year 2030. It is now inspecting the site for the bread production plant, where it will also set up a logistics center for the distribution of bread products and ingredients to Tous Les Jours branches.

Georgia and Texas are said to be the top candidates for the location of CJ Foodville’s new factory. It has already taken due diligence on the sites being considered but did not divulge the exact places. To fulfill its goal in the U.S., experts said that CJ Foodville is likely to invest at least KRW100 billion or about $77 million for this project.

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