By VINAYA SAKSENA

CUMBERLAND — A Canadian-owned manufacturer has announced plans to close its local operation, a move that will likely put about 400 people out of work

KIK Custom Products, a maker of various household and personal care items, announced earlier this week that it would be closing its local facility at 35 Martin St. sometime this fall.
The decision to close the Cumberland manufacturing facility, along with a smaller one in Egan, Minn., was made last week, according to company spokeswoman Kerry Morgan.
“It was a decision (made) after looking at all of our facilities,” she said. “We made the decision to keep facilities that are close to our customers and our distribution areas.”
Morgan said she could not reveal what areas had the greatest concentration of KIK customers. However, a map on the company’s Web site showed multiple manufacturing sites on the East Coast and around the Great Lakes, with a few in other parts of the country.
Established in 1995, the company formed a trust and went public in 2002, according to information on its Web site.
The site indicates that KIK specializes in laundry products, household cleaners, over-the-counter medicated, pharmaceutical and health and beauty products, with clients including Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, Walgreens and Target stores. Morgan said the Cumberland facility manufactured mostly personal care products such a deodorants.
KIK’s Cumberland facility had been the subject of pollution concerns in the past, according to a previous Times report.
That story noted that the Environmental Protection Agency and the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management approved a 15-year cleanup plan for the site, which was apparently called for after solvents spilled from a railway tank car in the 1970s.
Morgan said she was unaware of the incident, but indicated that the decision to close the Cumberland plant was not influenced by this issue or any other problems at the local level.
“I can absolutely say there were no (problems) reflected on the employees or the market,” she said. “They (the employees) performed exceptionally well.”
Morgan said KIK would work with employees losing their jobs, though some of the details as to how they would do so had not been finalized.
She said the company planned to provide “re-employment assistance,” to help employees with unemployment insurance applications and possibly offer work elsewhere within the company if slots were available.