February 9, 2017
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. – Consumer goods maker Reckitt Benckiser (RB.L) will lay off 140 employees as the company shifts its logistics center and manufacturing operations from Springfield to St. Peters, Mo., The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported this morning.
The company that makes consumer goods such as French’s mustard as well as health products like Mucinex cold remedies and Scholl foot products, said the operations are being moved in order to support the company’s household and retail food businesses. A WARN notice was filed with the state of Missouri on Jan. 31, but there was some initial confusion over the number of expected layoffs. Initially the state received a notice the company was planning to terminate 456 employees, the St. Louis Business Journal reported. However, the notice has been amended and shows the correct 140 terminations.
London-based Reckitt does maintain a manufacturing facility in Springfield for its mustard products and that will remain in its current location, the Post-Dispatch said. That site employs approximately 300 people.
With the move to the St. Peters site, company spokeswoman Suzanne Grogan told the Post-Dispatch that Reckitt will be hiring additional employees to support the operations."RB has around 260 employees at its existing St. Peters manufacturing plant and is actively looking to hire another 50 plus employees there,” Grogan said in an email to the paper.
In addition to the full-time employees, Ricketts employs about 350 contract workers at the St. Peters site.
The shift to St. Peters will put the Reckitt employees in a $31.5 million, 715,000-square-foot facility that will support product embellishment and repackaging of its home and food goods, the Journal said.
In 2014, Reckitt spun off its pharmaceuticals business into a separate entity, Indivior PLC. In September, Indivior was sued by 35 U.S. states for attempts to block generic drugs from entering the British market to compete with its drug, Suboxone, which is used to treat patients addicted to heroin and other opioids. Suboxone, an oral treatment, was initially approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2002. It did not have patent protection, but the FDA gave the drug a seven-year protection by assigning it orphan drug status. The lawsuit alleges that Indivior attempted to get prescribers to switch patients from the pill form to a dissolvable oral strip. That sublingual film version of Suboxone was licensed to Indivior by MonoSol Rx.
In 2015, Rakesh Kapoor, chief executive officer of Reckitt Benckiser, initiated a cost savings plan that was aimed at saving $200 million in annual costs. The cost containment announcement came on the heels of lower than expected earnings for 2014. In its latest earnings report, Reckitt posted revenue of $379.2 million, up 1 percent from the previous year, the Journal reported.
