MACHIASPORT — Atlantic Salmon of Maine is building a $2 million, 28,000-square-foot fish-processing plant that will be able to double the company’s capacity to more than 80,000 pounds of salmon per day. The facility will create 30 new full-time jobs.

“It [the processing area] is all on one floor, but there is a second story for an ice tower. The machines will be located up there, and they will drop ice down into the processing room,” said Richard Fochesato, processing manager for Atlantic Salmon. The plant is expected to be completed in mid-August.

Salmon the company raises locally now are gutted and shipped whole to East Coast customers. In the new facility, located on Small’s Point Road, some of the product will be filleted and portioned before shipment, Fochesato said.

In 1989, Atlantic Salmon converted an old Grange Hall on Route 92 into a processing plant. The company, which now employs 40 people, has been in business about 12 years, eight of those years in Machiasport. The company’s headquarters is in Fairfield, and it has a salmon hatchery in Rangeley.

Two years ago, the town applied for a $400,000 federal grant to help Atlantic Salmon of Maine expand its processing operation on Route 92.

“After looking at that and working with the town,” said Sandra Prescott, town coordinator of the project, “the company decided that rather than add onto an old building … they would look for a piece of land in town and build a new building,”

Prescott said the $400,000 grant would be used to fund the construction of a 130-by-42-foot pier, a few hundred feet from the new processing plant. The town will own and lease the new pier to the salmon processing company. The pier will replace a privately owned pier that was destroyed in a storm several years ago. She said the seven-year lease would earn the town more than $100,000 which would be used to provide a public pier for local fishermen.

Pier engineer Steve Ruell of Kline Schmidt Associates of Pittsfield said the steel and concrete pier would accommodate three boats. Construction is expected to be completed in mid-July.

Once the pier is completed, salmon from the company’s four fish farms will be brought there each day. Three of the fish farms are in Machiasport and the fourth is in Milbridge. When the fish arrive at the pier, they will be loaded onto trucks for the short trip to the plant. At the plant the salmon will be eviscerated, cleaned, cooled to 32 degrees and processed.

Prescott said the project had been successful in part because of the excellent relationship that existed between the town, the selectmen and the company. “The town has been very helpful to us. Anything we have needed, they’ve helped us with,” Fochesato added.