Great Lakes Leads U.S. in Q1 Food & Beverage Project Starts

As the new year unfurls, the results are in, and the Great Lakes region has emerged as the leading destination for U.S. Food & Beverage project spending in first-quarter 2024. With more than $2.3 billion worth of planned first-quarter project starts, the Great Lakes region, which includes Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, easily beats out the second-ranked Southeastern U.S. region, which comes in with $1.95 billion worth of planned first-quarter food and beverage project starts.

Within the Great Lakes region, Ohio emerges as the highest spender, thanks to some high-dollar projects. While food manufacturing often takes front and center in the industry, two of Ohio's largest food and beverage projects are for a cold storage warehouse and a beverage distribution center. The cold storage warehouse is being developed by chicken processor Koch Foods Incorporated (Park Ridge, Illinois) in Fairfield, on the northern outskirts of Cincinnati. The facility will be constructed on an 18-acre site that presently houses a former Liberty Mutual insurance building. The building will be demolished, and in its place will rise a new 450,000-square-foot cold storage facility. The facility will complement Koch's chicken processing plant, which is located about a mile away.

Koch expanded its operations in Fairfield in the first part of last year with the completion of an additional poultry processing plant near its original facility. The 400,000-square-foot new plant created hundreds of new jobs for the area and paved the way for the construction of the cold storage warehouse and distribution center, which is expected to go into service in 2025. Subscribers to Industrial Info's Global Market Intelligence (GMI) Food & Beverage Project Database can learn more by viewing the project reports on the completed processing plant and new cold storage facility.

In Columbus, Ohio, the U.S.' largest Coca-Cola bottler, Coca-Cola Consolidated Incorporated (Charlotte, North Carolina), is constructing a grassroot beverage warehouse and distribution center at the Rickenbacker Industrial Center. Early next year, Coca-Cola Consolidated will begin construction on a new 400,000-square-foot facility that will speed up the distribution of its Coca-Cola products when it opens in 2025. Subscribers can click here to learn more about the project.

But that's only two of a total of more than 125 planned food and beverage project starts across the six-state Great Lakes region. Within the region, next in line for spending is Illinois, which boasts more than 20 planned project starts in the first quarter. Many of the state's top planned food and beverage projects are firmly rooted in the agricultural sector. Among these is an upgrade project at a corn-processing plant in Decatur. Primient's (Decatur) plant in Decatur has been operating since 1969 and can process 54.75 million bushels of corn per year. For the project, Primient is upgrading two tube germ dryers with major equipment overhauls. The project is expected to be completed in the second quarter of next year. Subscribers can click here for more details.

In Creal Springs, in southern Illinois, Saline River Farms LLC (Creal Springs) will begin renovating the former Four Star arena into a meat-processing plant, bringing about 400 jobs to the area. The groundbreaking ceremony has been held, and construction is set to begin in early 2024. When completed in mid-2025, the facility will begin ramping up to a full processing capacity of more than 40.3 million pounds of beef and 19 million pounds of pork per year. Subscribers can click here to learn more.

Rounding out the top three states for first-quarter food and beverage spending in the Great Lakes market region is Kentucky, which has several planned projects at its many distilleries. Among the largest of these is Whiskey House of Kentucky's addition of four rickhouses, where spirits are aged, at its under-construction distillery in Elizabethtown. Construction on the distillery began in late 2022 and is expected to be completed this summer, with 16 rickhouses in operation. The addition of the four new rickhouses will kick off early next year, and they should be completed by the year's end. Each of the rickhouses will be able to store 41,500 bourbon barrels. Subscribers can learn more by reading the project reports on the grassroot distillery and rickhouse additions.

Subscribers to Industrial Info's GMI Food & Beverage Project Database can click here to see reports for all of the projects discussed in this article and click here for the related plant profiles.