HYANNIS — About a quarter of the 80 workers at the Cape Cod Potato Chips facility on Breeds Hill Road were laid off Wednesday during a meeting at the Resort and Conference Center in Hyannis.

Employees of the chip manufacturer who had attended the meeting inside a second floor conference room commiserated over the news under a gray sky after exiting into the parking lot.

“We saw it coming,” said a South Dennis man, who worked as a cook at the facility and declined to give his name. “The place was a junkyard for years. We worked with 40-year-old equipment. It’s a mess over there, it really is.”

Of the 80 workers at the Hyannis facility, 21 were let go, according to Bethridge Toovell, a spokeswoman for the Campbell Soup Co., which bought the chip factory’s parent company, Snyder’s-Lance, for $4.87 billion earlier this year.

An additional five warehouse positions were eliminated at a facility off Cape, she said.

The layoffs were the result of upgrades to the production facility, according to Toovell.

“We made a business decision as we evaluated our supply chain that the Hyannis facility could be better optimized by removing older equipment,” she said. “So we decided to move (two) of our production lines which includes 12 of the old kettle fryers. And while it was a great decision for our business, it was difficult to make because it did affect several plant positions.”

Read more in the Sept. 13 edition of the Cape Cod Times newspaper.