Freeze-dried ingredient manufacturer scaling production and supply chain
Watershed Foods manufactures freeze-dried fruits, yogurts, and powders for food companies globally from a Central Illinois facility. The tech stack is heavily weighted toward manufacturing automation (PLCs, HMIs, SCADA, Profibus, Modbus) and enterprise resource planning (SAP, Oracle, Infor, Maximo), with active ERP migration underway — typical of a mid-sized manufacturer optimizing for scale. Hiring velocity is accelerating across engineering, manufacturing, and ops, with concurrent focus on lean initiatives and new equipment development, signaling capacity expansion to meet demand.
Watershed Foods is a freeze-dried food ingredient supplier serving food manufacturers and snack companies globally. The company operates a production facility in Gridley, Illinois, and specializes in freeze-dried fruit, yogurt, and powders marketed as healthy ingredient solutions. With 201–500 employees, the operation spans manufacturing, engineering, operations, research, and support functions. Active projects center on lean manufacturing improvements, new equipment development, process design, and production scale-up, alongside ongoing challenges in balancing demand against current capacity and managing working capital and inventory.
SAP, Oracle, Maximo, and Infor for enterprise resource planning and maintenance; PLCs, HMIs, and SCADA for production control; CAD tools include SolidWorks, Creo, and Inventor. An ERP migration is currently underway.
Headquarters and production facility in Gridley, Illinois, approximately 20 minutes from Bloomington-Normal, in Central Illinois.
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Watershed Foods LLC's technology stack, projects, and hiring signals are inferred from public hiring and company data — career pages, public listings, and company web presence — then clustered and de-duplicated. Figures are estimates that refresh over time. Read our full methodology →
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