The news
Reckitt will invest up to $600 million in two US sites: a Mucinex plant in Wilson, North Carolina, and a new research campus in Nutley, New Jersey, the company said this week.
The Wilson plant gets the larger share. Reckitt is doubling its investment there to about $400 million and adding 234,000 square feet to the 310,000-square-foot building, per the Wall Street Journal. It will be Reckitt’s largest US plant for over-the-counter medicines when it opens in the first half of 2027.
Reckitt bought the plant in 2024 to move some Mucinex production to the US from factories in Mexico and the UK, the Journal reports. The company says the spending is meant to speed up product development, protect its supply chain from disruptions and help it meet spikes in demand.
What changed
Reckitt makes about 57% of what it sells in the US inside the US, with the rest coming from places including Mexico and Southeast Asia, Reuters reported last year. Wilson could lift that to 75%. Haleon, its closest rival, is at about 80%.
Mucinex is Reckitt’s No. 1 over-the-counter product in the US, and demand for it swings with the cold and flu season. “The factory in Wilson enables us to increase access and meet future demand during in-season and off-season surges,” Chris Tedesco, a Reckitt senior vice president, said when the plant was first announced.
The plant is a former Sandoz generics site that Novartis shut in 2024. Reckitt announced the purchase that September at $145.6 million and 289 jobs, per the North Carolina Commerce Department, then raised its figure to $200 million and added Move Free and Biofreeze to the plan. This week’s announcement doubles it again and adds Mucinex tablet and liquid lines. Reckitt already runs seven US plants, in Utah, New Jersey, Indiana, Missouri, Minnesota and Michigan, per Supply Chain Dive.
In New Jersey, Reckitt is consolidating its commercial and R&D teams onto one campus in Nutley and moving its Lysol research group there from nearby Montvale.
Reckitt has not named tariffs as a reason. Its release talks about innovation, consumer responsiveness and supply resilience.
The pattern
Reckitt is the fourth company in seven weeks to move one product line out of a foreign plant and into a US one.
GE Appliances: dryers from Mexico into a Louisville, Kentucky, building it is converting from refrigerators, at more than $400 million of a $1 billion package.
La-Z-Boy: upholstery assembly from two Mexican plants into its US plants, per its latest 10-Q and our coverage.
Sapporo: non-alcoholic beer from Canada into the US by the first half of 2027, per Bloomberg.
Reckitt: Mucinex from Mexico and the UK into Wilson.
The four have the same shape. Each is a consumer-goods maker moving one finished product that sells mostly to US buyers. Three of the four are pulling it out of Mexico or Canada. None of the three with a site picked is building from the ground up: GE is converting a building it owns, La-Z-Boy is moving into plants it already runs, and Reckitt bought a plant that was closed. Sapporo is still choosing between a West Coast brewery and a contract brewer.
New factory building is falling at the same time. Private spending on factory construction ran at an annual rate of $168 billion in July, down 22% from a year earlier and from a peak of $249 billion in September 2024, per the Census Bureau.
Drugmakers are the other group, on a bigger scale. Fourteen prescription-drug companies, including Eli Lilly, Merck and Pfizer, have pledged more than $480 billion in US manufacturing since early 2025 under the threat of pharmaceutical tariffs. Reckitt is the only over-the-counter maker so far to build a plant. Haleon is moving a UK oral-care plant to Slovakia. Kenvue has cut its tariff exposure through pricing and sourcing rather than new capacity, per its 10-Q.
What’s next
Wilson opens in the first half of 2027, in time for the following cold and flu season. The Nutley campus is due in 2029.
