Lamb Weston has selected a suburb of Boise for its corporate headquarters, but the Columbia Basin is still a winner as the frozen potato giant moves toward independence from its Chicago-based parent, ConAgra Foods.
Lamb Weston will become a standalone, publicly traded company sometime this fall.
When that happens, Lamb Weston will instantly become one of the Northwest’s largest private companies. Its 2015 revenue of $2.9 billion would have ranked Lamb Weston at the time at about 750th on the Fortune 1000 list of America’s largest companies.
ConAgra announced it would spin off Lamb Weston more than a year ago with a target of completing the transaction by this fall.
Lamb Weston is expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LW. It will make its first public appearance during an investor day program Oct. 13 in New York City.
Frank “Gib” Lamb incorporated Lamb Weston as a frozen pea company but soon branched into the frozen potato market, where Lamb is regarded as an early pioneer of techniques to process and cut potatoes for consumer markets.
The company opened its first potato processing plant in American Falls, Idaho, adding and acquiring additional plants and facilities throughout the Northwest in subsequent years until it was the world’s largest processor of frozen potato products.
It has been a subsidiary of ConAgra since 1988, a partnership that helped fuel its reach into European, South American and Asian markets.
