Every IndustryWeek Best Plants winner, 1990 to 2026

IndustryWeek named four plants as its 2026 Best Plants in September. Two are in the United States, one is in Mexico and one is in Canada. This is the 36th class since the award began in 1990.

• Bullen Ultrasonics – Miller Williams Facility
  Eaton, Ohio · Precision machining of advanced ceramics
• Cooper Standard El Jarudo
  Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico · Automotive components including fuel rails
• Intertape Polymer Group
  Carbondale, Illinois · Pressure sensitive tape
• LB Foster Rail Technologies Corp.
  Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada · Friction control railroad products

Two of the four companies have won before. Intertape Polymer Group’s Carbondale plant also won in 2023. L.B. Foster Rail Technologies won in 2014, when IndustryWeek listed it in Vancouver.

The map shows every North American winner since 1990. Each dot is a town or city, sized by the number of awards its plants have won.

The award goes to single manufacturing plants in the United States, Canada and Mexico, not to whole companies. John H. Sheridan founded the program in 1990.

Each plant fills in a long questionnaire with essay and multiple-choice questions. It covers leadership, quality, employee involvement, suppliers, technology and the production system. A panel of IndustryWeek editors reviews the entries with help from outside manufacturing experts. Winners have to show that their performance numbers improved. In 2000, IndustryWeek said no winner was final until its editors had visited the plant.

IndustryWeek ran a European competition twice, in 2000 and 2002. Each time it added four European plants to the North American winners. They are in the list below and marked. IndustryWeek combined 2020 and 2021 into one class.

IndustryWeek named 12 plants in 1990 and 10 a year after that, through 2011. Since 2012 the classes have been smaller: six to eight plants a year until 2018, and two to four since 2019.

At least ten plants have won the award twice or more. Two have won three times: Raymond’s forklift plant in Greene, New York, and Intertape Polymer Group’s film plant in Tremonton, Utah.

General Cable and Lockheed Martin lead with 12 wins each. General Cable won with plants in 11 cities, from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, to Tetla, Mexico, all between 2003 and 2014. Lockheed Martin’s wins run from 1994 to 2013, most of them at defense plants.

Johnson & Johnson units won seven times under four names: Johnson & Johnson Medical in 1991 and 1993, Cordis in 2006 and 2008, Ethicon in 2011 and 2012, and DePuy Synthes in 2015. Batesville Casket, Collins & Aikman and Textron have five wins each.

Of the 290 North American awards, 256 went to plants in the 50 states, 19 to Mexico, 9 to Canada and 5 to Puerto Rico. One 1996 winner, a Halliburton plant, has no location we could confirm.

Ohio and Texas have the most winners, 18 each, followed by Tennessee with 17 and California with 16.

Mexican winners were rare before 2000. The 1990s had one, TRW’s air bag plant in Chihuahua in 1996. From 2000 to 2019 there were 16. Since then, Cooper Standard plants won in Aguascalientes in 2023 and Juárez in 2026.

Toyota plants appear early and often. NUMMI, the car plant in Fremont, California, that Toyota and General Motors ran together, was in the first class in 1990. NUMMI closed in April 2010, and Tesla now builds cars in the same factory. Nippondenso, now Denso, won in 1991 with its plant in Battle Creek, Michigan.

Toyota Industries, the Toyota group company that began as Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, owns two forklift makers that have won four times between them. Toyota Industrial Equipment Mfg. won in 2011 in Columbus, Indiana. Raymond won in 2014, 2018 and 2022 in Greene, New York.

IndustryWeek marks four winners as gone: Digital Equipment’s plant in Colorado Springs (1990), Johnson & Johnson Medical’s Artcraft plant in El Paso (1993), the Unisys Government Systems Group plant in Pueblo, Colorado (1993), and Philips Professional Luminaires in Sparta, Tennessee (2009). NUMMI also closed, in April 2010, though IndustryWeek’s list does not mark it.

Names are as IndustryWeek lists them. Locations and products come from IndustryWeek’s yearly winners articles and plant profiles, and for 1990 to 1995 from Theodore Kinni’s 1996 book on the award. Each year links to its source.