Investors signal interest in taking over Ardo plant
Tuesday 6th October 2026 on 18:15 in
Austria
Private investors have expressed interest in taking over Ardo’s frozen-food plant in Groß-Enzersdorf, ORF reported, as talks on the facility’s future are set to resume on Wednesday.
Two Austrian investors are interested, according to a report by the Kurier newspaper. They told Ardo last week they wanted to take over the plant, the property, its employees and its suppliers. Ardo declined to comment on the reported interest to ORF.
Wednesday’s meeting is due to include Belgian Ardo managers Rob Teunissen, Tijl Goens and Rudolf Steger, the finance chief of Ardo Austria Frost GmbH, and representatives from politics and agriculture. Ardo said it would provide government representatives with further information about the planned closure.
The company announced in late September that it would close the Groß-Enzersdorf plant in 2027. It says modernising the infrastructure would require more than 100 million euros, an investment it considers too high for what it described as a relatively small domestic market. Ardo plans to strip the buildings’ interiors and move production equipment to other sites.
Ardo said it had invested several million euros in the plant’s equipment, including lines for herbs and spinach. The machinery is not old, the company said, and is intended to continue operating elsewhere.
The federal and state governments offered support to keep the plant open last week, but details have not been made public. Lower Austria’s deputy governor, Stephan Pernkopf, said replacing domestic vegetables with Belgian produce was not a workable solution. The Austrian Trade Union Federation’s Lower Austria branch also called for all economically and organisationally viable options to be assessed.
The closure would affect 190 employees, for whom a social plan is being prepared, as well as 50 agency workers. Ardo said it processed produce from about 270 farmers in Lower Austria in 2025. The Tiefkühlgemüse producer organisation, which supplies Ardo, has 500 member farms; the Lower Austrian Chamber of Agriculture estimates that around 500 farming family businesses in the Marchfeld region are affected by the closure.