Aunt Millie's to fire up the ovens in Lowell

"We are pleased to be making this investment in Indiana, our home state," said company president John F. Popp. "For some time we have needed additional capacity and this new bakery will allow us to better serve Chicagoland and the Wisconsin markets."

The company projected last year it would spend $25 million on the new equipment and building. It plans to employ 117 people. The bakery is within a tax increment financing district and the property was granted a tax abatement by the town.

Aunt Millie's Bakeries said the new facility has the latest in sophisticated equipment designed to produce high-quality products in a safe and efficient manner.

There is an Aunt Millie's Bakeries outlet store at 8280 Mississippi St., in Merrillville. The new bakery in Lowell will not have an outlet store.

The company is family-owned and has been headquartered in Fort Wayne since 1901. It produces a wide array of Aunt Millie's bread and bakery products as well as other brands. The company operates six other bakeries in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio. It also has 50 distribution centers and 40 outlet stores, with some of those in the additional states of Kentucky, Illinois and Wisconsin.

The company boasts on its Web site that its Fort Wayne bakery is one of the fastest in the United States. The computer-operated plant houses five packaging lines baking as many as 200 loaves of bread per minute. The plant has an automatic oven, an automatic warming chamber, an automatic pan stacker and retrieval system and an automatic basket loading machine.