Factories are twice as efficient. "You're going places."
13
Child labor
Own 5 factories
6.5 million
Factories are twice as efficient. "Cheaper, healthier workforce."
14
Sweatshop
Own 25 factories
65 million
Factories are twice as efficient. "Slackers will be terminated."
15
Radium reactors
Own 50 factories
6.5 billion
Factories are twice as efficient. "Gives your cookies a healthy glow."
46
Recombobulators
Own 100 factories
650 billion
Factories are twice as efficient. "A major part of cookie recombobulation."
112
Deep-bake process
Own 150 factories
65 trillion
Factories are twice as efficient. "A patented process increasing cookie yield two-fold for the same amount of ingredients. Don't ask how, don't take pictures, and be sure to wear your protective suit."
194
Cyborg workforce
Own 200 factories
65 quadrillion
Factories are twice as efficient. "Semi-synthetic organisms don't slack off, don't unionize, and have 20% shorter lunch breaks, making them ideal labor fodder."
297
78-hour days
Own 250 factories
65 quintillion
Factories are twice as efficient. "Why didn't we think of this earlier?"
310
Machine learning
Own 300 factories
65 sextillion
Factories are twice as efficient. "You figured you might get better productivity if you actually told your workers to learn how to work the machines. Sometimes, it's the little things..."
431
Brownie point system
Own 350 factories
65 septillion
Factories are twice as efficient. "Oh, these are lovely! You can now reward your factory employees for good behavior, such as working overtime or snitching on coworkers. 58 brownie points gets you a little picture of a brownie, and 178 of those pictures gets you an actual brownie piece for you to do with as you please! Infantilizing? Maybe. Oodles of fun? You betcha!"
483
"Volunteer" interns
Own 400 factories
650 octillion
Factories are twice as efficient. "If you're bad at something, always do it for free."
509
Behavioral reframing
Own 450 factories
6.5 decillion
Factories are twice as efficient. "Through careful social engineering you've convinced your workers that "union" is a slur that only the most vile and repugnant filth among us would ever dare utter! Sometimes progress isn't in the big machines, it's in the little lies!"
665
The infinity engine
Own 500 factories
65 undecillion
Factories are twice as efficient. "In this house, I guess we don't care much for the laws of thermodynamics."
703
N-dimensional assembly lines
Own 550 factories
650 duodecillion
Factories are twice as efficient. "Lines are depressingly 1-dimensional. Beyond assembly lines, we posit the existence of higher-order assembly entities, such as assembly squares, assembly cubes - perhaps even assembly tesseracts. Any deeper than that and we doubt we'll be able to write manuals your workers can read."
746
Universal automation
Own 600 factories
6.5 quattuordecillion
Factories are twice as efficient. "It's simple common sense; the more automation, the less work you have to do! Maybe one day you'll even automate yourself out of your own job. Exciting!"
843
Grandma Form(s)
Purchasing 15 Factories allows for the purchasing of a Grandma upgrade and a new Grandma type.
Grandmas are twice as efficient. Factories gain +1% CpS per 3 grandmas. "A nice worker to manufacture more cookies."
58
Worker Grandma
Worker Grandma
In Cookie Clicker Classic
Two images from the Classic version, left: icon shown in the store, right: appearance in the middle field
The Factory is the third-cheapest item you can purchase. It will give you 20 cookies every 5 seconds. It costs 500 cookies to start and will increase 10% each consecutive purchase.
Purchasing your first Factory increases Grandma output by +1 Cookie per 5 seconds. It will also cause some grandmas to wear blue work suits and yellow hard hats.
Trivia
You need at least 15 factories to purchase the "Worker Grandmas" upgrade.
Factories will be the first buildings to have their dungeons.
Factories are the first building to reach 1,000,000,000,000,000 (1 quadrillion) at 200 buildings purchased or less.
When you have 50 Factories on the beta (v.1.037 beta), you unlock Dungeons.
In Cookie Clicker Classic,the mines were unlocked after the factories,but in cookie clicker update 1.0 this was changed the other way around.
The achievement "The incredible machine" likely refers to the series with the same name, "The Incredible Machine".
The achievement "Rise of the machines" is a reference to movie Terminator 3: Rise of the machines.