Sta. Stellaville, LIBERTY, N.C. –
WARN notices filed on Nov. 25 signal plant closures for two major cabinet manufacturers in North Carolina. Dura Supreme Cabinetry and UltraCraft Cabinetry, both brands of MasterBrand Cabinetry, are scheduled to close their North Carolina manufacturing facilities next year, leaving more than 270 employees facing layoffs.
Dura Supreme Cabinetry will lay off all 74 workers at its Statesville facility and close the location, effective Jan. 20, 2025, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN). It was roughly one year ago that the cabinet manufacturer rolled out the first cabinets at the multi-million dollar, 300,000-square-foot production site, where it had expected to create approximately 200 jobs.
MasterBrand acquired the Minnesota-based Dura Supreme, along with Iowa-based Bertch Cabinet, as part of its acquisition of Supreme Cabinetry earlier this year.
Farand Pawlak, vice president, of investor relations & corporate communications, at MasterBrand, said, “This was not only an announcement related to the Statesville facility, but this also relates to one of our legacy facilities at Liberty.” He added, “We had announced on Wednesday (Nov. 20) to our associates that both the Liberty facility that we have in North Carolina that makes UltraCraft Cabinetry, as well as the Dura Supreme facility. Both of those would be impacted.”
Also listed in the WARN notice is the permanent closure of UltraCraft’s 213,000-square-foot facility in Liberty, resulting in the layoff of 200 employees effective Sept. 25, 2025. (The name on the WARN notice is Norcraft Companies LP. MasterBrand acquired Norcraft in 2015 and its brands, Mid Continent, UltraCraft, Starmark and Fieldstone, in 2015.)
Pawlak said MasterBrand is always looking at its manufacturing network and seeing where it can improve manufacturing optimization. “When we acquired Statesville,(location in 2023) we then had three facilities within 200 miles of each other, and they were all a little underutilized.”
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In addition to the Statesville and Liberty facilities, the third plant to which Fawlak referred is the Kinston Operations Facility, at 651 Collier-Loftin Road, Kinston, North Carolina.
“This [plan] presented us the opportunity to say, all right, Kingston right now [has] the space to house the other two facilities. Those two premium facilities then are going to move into that Kingston facility, which is semi custom. We’re not getting rid of the premium lines, we plan to still run the them in Kinston where there will be a premium area that will be segregated with dedicated employees, dedicated leadership, dedicated equipment to continue to make the Dura Suprene and UltraCraft products.”
In 2021, MasterBrand invested nearly $14 million to expand operations to Kinston and add 450 jobs over five years. For its investment, MasterBrand received nearly $4 million in state tax incentives over 12 years.
Acoording to Fawlak, any associate who is interested in moving to one of its other facilities can apply for a job at the other location, and if hired they will be offered relocation assistance.
MasterBrand is ranked #7 in the FDMC 300, a listing of the largest wood products manufacturers in North America. Supreme Cabinetry (Dura Supreme and Bertch) ranked #45 prior to its July 2024 acquisition by MasterBrand.
