Bridgewater Hot Dog Casing Plant Wins Approval For Expansion

BRIDGEWATER, NJ — The Bridgewater Township Planning Board has approved a 16,000-square-foot expansion of the Viscofan USA plant on Southside Avenue. The facility makes casings used in most hot dogs sold in the United States.

The board granted preliminary and final major site plan approval, along with bulk variance relief, following a hearing in which company executives and consultants testified about the project.

Guillermo Diez, CEO of Viscofan USA, told the board that two of every three hot dogs consumed in the United States are made with casing manufactured at the Bridgewater facility. The plant also produces collagen-based biomedical gels used in products such as burn dressings, Diez said.

The property, at 141 Southside Avenue, sits on a corner lot at Southside and Loser avenues and totals just over 15 acres, according to testimony from the applicant's attorney. It is zoned M-2 and contains four buildings.

Diez said the site has a decades-long history of casing production. The main building was constructed in the mid-1960s, and the property changed hands from Johnson & Johnson to Nitta Casing in 1991. Viscofan has owned and operated the plant since 2020, according to Diez's testimony.

Diez said two of the four buildings on the property — a former administrative building and a former research and development building — currently sit vacant or are used only for storage. The other two buildings house the plant's production lines and its raw material processing operations. The expansion will add space to the processing building.

The company currently employs 132 people, Diez testified, with a maximum of about 80 workers on-site at any time accounting for shift overlap. The plant operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, using two 12-hour shifts, according to testimony.

Diez testified that the byproducts of the casing-making process are food-safe and that no hazardous materials result from production. He said the facility uses a small amount of chlorine for lab quality testing, which is disposed of in a designated hazardous waste container unrelated to the expansion project.

According to a stormwater compliance letter filed with the township by the applicant's engineering firm, Paulus, Sokolowski and Sartor, the project will increase impervious surface on the site by 0.30 acres, bringing the total to 1.77 acres. A geotechnical investigation found the site's soil has low permeability, and no high water table was encountered during testing, though the area was in drought conditions at the time.

The application also included plans for reconfigured parking and drive aisles, new internal driveways, and pathways intended to separate vehicle and pedestrian traffic, according to testimony.

Board members voted unanimously to approve the application.

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