Lloyd Industries Inc., a Spokane-based pizza-pan and equipment maker, has bought the assets of Paul Eyraud Co., a Cheney business that made commercial baking products and Martha Stewart Living-brand baking pans.


The transaction will allow Lloyd Industries to expand its market reach and increase its sales by an estimated 30 percent, says John Crow, the companys president. He declines to disclose the terms of the transaction.


Lloyd Industries designs, manufactures, and distributes aluminum pizza pans and several items of pizza-making equipment, such as dough rollers, pizza cutters, and rolling carts, and custom-makes some other metal products, such as covers for outdoor electronics equipment. It will continue Eyrauds former product lines, but under the Lloyd Industries brand, Crow says. The equipment acquired in the sale will allow Lloyd to create new productssuch as custom cookie cutters, which Crow says, for example, could be made in the shape of college logosand expand into new markets, selling both retail and wholesale bakery products.


Lloyd sells its products mostly to pizza-chain outlets across the country, including Godfathers Pizza, Roundtable Pizza, and Dominos Pizza, Crow says. The company has grown from sales of just under $1 million in 1997 to $2.5 million last year. He projects sales will be between $3.5 million and $4 million this year, attributing much of that expected growth to the acquisition of Eyrauds assets.


Crow says he got into the pizza-pan business through a connection to Paul Eyraud Co. In 1986, he founded Lloyd Industries and worked as an independent sales representative in San Diego, Calif. Three years later, Crow says he began selling Eyrauds pans to other companies. Eyraud then was based in Ontario, Calif. In the mid-1990s, Crow bought the pizza-pan portion of Eyrauds business. He moved Lloyd Industries to Spokane in 1994, and Eyraud moved to Cheney about a year later, he says.


In the recent transaction, Lloyd hired three of Eyrauds 12 former employees, bringing its total work force to 20 people. Crow says Lloyd is in the process of hiring between four and eight more people, because the company currently is expanding into a second location and soon will be adding a second shift. All of Lloyds fabricating will be done at an 8,000-square-foot building in the Hillyard area that the company leased recently, while the sealing and finishing, shipping, and administrative functions will remain at a 10,000-square-foot building at 2825 N. Hogan that the company has leased for several years.


For several months now, Crow has been working toward acquiring land to build a 40,000-square-foot structure that would house all of the companys operations. He says to gain assistance in that planned expansion of his business, he has been working with the Spokane Area Economic Development Council in hopes of utilizing Spokanes recent Washington state designation as a community empowerment zone. Businesses that locate operations within the empowerment zone and hire residents of the zone can be eligible for businesses sales- and use-tax deferrals and tax credits. Crow says he currently is looking at a number of sites inside the zone for the new building.


The area included in the zone lies roughly between the eastern and the western city limits and stretches from Francis Avenue on the north into the vicinity of the lower South Hill.