Litehouse Inc., the Sandpoint-based salad dressing maker, says it plans to spend more than $10 million to open a plant in the southern Utah rural community of Hurricane, and expects that the facility eventually will employ 162 full-time workers.

Jim Frank, Litehouse's president, says the plant will occupy an 88,500-square-foot shell building there that the company has bought. Its purchase included six acres of land on which the three-year-old building is located, plus an adjoining seven acres for possible future expansion, Frank says.

Litehouse bought the property from a bank after it had gone into foreclosure, Frank says. The concrete tilt-up building there is a single-story structure, but was designed for distribution uses and has 32-foot ceiling clearances inside, making it well-suited for Litehouse's needs, he says. The family-owned company expects to open the plant in the second quarter of next year.

Hurricane is located just off Interstate 15 in the southwest corner of the state and is just north of St. George, in one of the fastest-growing areas of the state.

"We are excited to announce that our business has grown to the point where we are in need of another facility," Edward Hawkins, Litehouse's CEO and founder, said in a recent news release announcing the plant. He added, "Our expansion projections have been to secure a site in the area of the country that will provide Litehouse with logistical synergies for many of our customers in the Southwestern region."

"The positive economic and business conditions of the state and local municipalities, and the opportunity to better serve our customers, were key elements in our decision to expand in Hurricane," Frank said.

He said, "This region not only offers competitive utility and labor rates, but the state of Utah offered Litehouse a taxpayer incentive of $502,400 as a tax credit over 10 years." He said the Utah plant will produce a mix of Litehouse's current lines as well as products from Green Garden Foods, a Kent, Wash.-based company that Litehouse acquired earlier this year.

Litehouse has annual sales of more than $120 million and, as the Journal reported in June, is on an aggressive expansion path. Frank told the Journal then that the company aims to increase its sales by close to 80 percent within five years, and hopes eventually to be one of the top 10 food producers in the country.

At the time that story was published, the company said it had about 500 employees, including 340 at its Sandpoint plant and headquarters, and another about 150 at a plant it operates in Lowell, Mich., along with some temporary employees at different times. It said in the recent press release that it now employs more than 500 people, and that its Michigan facility is expanding.