Walkers’ crisps production facility in Leicester, UK, is one of the largest crisp production plants in the world.
Walkers is a snack food manufacturer based in the UK and owned by PepsiCo, a food and beverage company based in the US. The company’s factories are highly automated with minimum human intervention.
Recommended Buyers Guides
In June 2023, PepsiCo announced its plans to invest $72m in the Leicester factory to increase its capacity by 11,000t a year and meet growing demand for Walkers products.
The expansion was completed in 2024 and was one of the largest investments made by PepsiCo in the UK since the early 2000s.
Walkers crisps production facility expansion details
The new investment in the Leicester facility included the installation of a new manufacturing line that increased the production of Walkers snacks, especially Wotsits and Monster Munch, for which demand has grown due to new flavours and formats.
In addition, the Wotsits Giants and Monster Munch Giants snacks that are currently manufactured in Europe are manufactured at the Leicester facility, helping to reduce 915 tonnes per annum (tpa) of transport-related emissions.
The investment also included the replacement of existing machinery with more sustainable equipment. Two new electric ovens were installed, and existing gas-fired ovens were converted to operate on electricity. The ovens are supplied with 100% renewable energy, which helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1,500tpa.
PepsiCo also focused on improving employee amenities at the facility. New training areas, a restaurant, meeting rooms and celebration space were added as part of the investment.
Equipment installed at the Walkers facility
The Leicester facility expansion included the installation of flow wrap machines, including P325S-SP multipack flow wrapping solution from Redpack, which is designed for high-speed packing.
The P325S-SP’s flexible flow wrapping set-up enables quick changeovers between products of varying sizes. It is widely used to bundle single-serve products into multipacks, including crisps and other snack lines.
The horizontal flow wrapping machine can be readily incorporated into automated manufacturing lines.
The Walkers Crisps facility is also equipped with four TLM-F44 automated packaging systems from Schubert UK. The systems were developed by IPS, Schubert’s specialist packaging integration subsidiary.
The four packaging systems handle the packing of multi-bags of crisps by placing the three varieties of packets into horizontal flow wrappers (fill and seal).
The TLM-F44 system is equipped with the carbon fibre TLM-F4 robot arm, which weighs 25% less than the previous aluminium version, allowing faster cycle times.
Storage hoppers above two vibratory bowl feeders supply the lines with 480 bags each minute. The system then uses optical detection to guide pick-and-place robots equipped with vacuum suckers to position the six or 12 packs into in-feed chain carriers. The packets are then sent to form, fill and seal flow wrappers.
The Schubert systems use the company’s patented counter-flow technology, where two chains operate against the flow of the product conveyor, making sure that there are only fully loaded chain divisions. Unidentified or incorrectly positioned crisp packets are sent back to the storage hoppers.
The systems were designed to handle a wide range of pack sizes (six, 12, 14 and 26) and can quickly change over to different product formats.
Investments in Southern Region Distribution Centre
The Leicester site’s Southern Region Distribution Centre (SRDC) is central to the company’s UK supply network, dispatching goods produced at six UK manufacturing sites nationwide.
In 2006, Walkers initiated a $20.9m project to expand the automated warehouse facilities and improve production. As part of the project, 10,000 pallet spaces were added to the SRDC, increasing the total pallet spaces at the site to 35,000.
Subsequently, a $19.1m investment was made in September 2021 in the SRDC to establish a new building featuring advanced equipment and technology to boost the storage capacity of the centre by 29%.
The new facility features automation to speed up pallet retrieval and movement using 18 shuttle vehicles operating across nine levels that collect, store and sequence stock quickly and efficiently.
Earlier, the company depended on overflow warehouses, meaning crisps had to be stored and then moved between multiple sites. With increased on-site capacity, more products can be kept at the main location, removing more than 600,000km of transport journeys each year and cutting annual emissions by over 400t of CO₂.
In March 2026, PepsiCo announced an investment of $4.83m to install a 3.56MW-peak solar power system for the SRDC.
Delivered in partnership with energy infrastructure provider Ineco Energy, the initiative will cover around 30,000m2 of the SRDC’s roof area with solar photovoltaic panels.
The solar system is projected to produce approximately 2.84GW-hours of renewable power each year, equivalent to the annual electricity use of around 1,000 UK households. Any additional generation will be redirected to the Walkers crisps facility.
Work on the solar power system has already commenced, and the installation is scheduled to be finished by September 2026. When operational, the installation is forecast to supply all of the site’s annual electricity requirement, helping to ease reliance on the national grid.
Sustainable packaging for Walkers crisps
In October 2010, Walkers produced eco-friendly crisp packets by using reusable potato peelings. The company believes that potato starch waste bags would be more attractive than bags made from wood pulp.
PepsiCo also invested $15.6m to enhance sustainability in food packaging in October 2022. The company started a trial with the UK supermarket Tesco to roll out new cardboard outer packaging for Walkers 22 and 24-bag multipacks. The outer packaging was launched in major supermarkets following the successful completion of the trial.
In March 2023, PepsiCo trialled new paper-based outer packaging for Walkers baked multipacks. The fully recyclable trial pack can replace the plastic outer packaging on more than 300,000 multipacks.
Walkers launched paper multi-bags for all Walkers baked multipacks in October 2023. The bags help reduce virgin plastic usage on the outer packaging by 180tpa. During the same month, the company launched new packaging made from recycled plastic for its Sunbites range.
Paper-based outer packaging was also launched for Snack A Jacks multipacks in April 2024. The move is expected to cut annual use of virgin plastic by 65t.
