Heartland Coca-Cola web site. Picture through Google Road View
Heartland Coca-Cola Bottling Co. has gotten one step nearer to realizing its new manufacturing campus in Olathe, Kan., with a latest thumbs-up from the Olathe Planning Fee. In a unanimous vote, the five-member physique accredited a revised preliminary web site improvement plan for the roughly 1.2 million-square-foot industrial undertaking roughly 25 miles southwest of Kansas Metropolis.
Heartland closed on the acquisition of the 116-acre improvement web site in September 2022. The longer term manufacturing, warehouse and workplace advanced will come on-line solely 13 miles from the corporate’s headquarters in Lenexa, Kan.
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Heartland’s collection of the Olathe property was purely an actual property choice. “Once we appeared on the potential for this undertaking, we appeared in St. Louis, the place we’ve got a big facility, we appeared in Lenexa and we additionally appeared across the complete Kansas Metropolis metro space and we simply couldn’t discover the quantity of land that we would wish to construct a brand-new facility till we appeared into Olathe,” Edward Bryant, a vp with Heartland Coca-Cola Bottling Co., informed Business Property Govt.
The planning fee green-lighted Heartland’s up to date imaginative and prescient for the manufacturing campus. The safe facility will likely be developed in phases, with the primary roughly 600,000-square-foot part encompassing roughly 312,000 sq. toes of manufacturing, gear and recycling house, 287,000 sq. toes of warehousing lodging, 14,000 sq. toes of workplace house, in addition to different accent constructions. The second part of the undertaking would yield an additional 216,000 sq. toes of manufacturing and gear house, 277,000 sq. toes of warehouse house and extra accent constructions.
The Olathe campus will likely be twice as massive because the 600,000-square-foot undertaking the corporate put in entrance of the planning fee in October 2022, and considerably bigger than the present manufacturing facility, which consists of simply 185,000 sq. toes on 9 acres of land. “It is a generational funding so we’re not simply investing for the following 5 years, we’re investing for the following 40,” Bryant stated. “We’re constructing for what we might have sooner or later in order that’s why we obtained approval for what we expect we’d do when and if we do a part two.”
Enlargement with intent
Heartland isn’t simply increasing for the sake of increasing; the corporate endeavors to bolster its standing as an anchor Coca-Cola bottler within the Midwest. Heartland could be unable to additional its objective whereas working in its present manufacturing facility, which isn’t solely constrained in measurement; having been in-built 1969, it is usually restricted by its age.
“This [new facility] goes to solidify us as one of many go-to bottlers within the Midwest for quite a lot of completely different merchandise,” Bryant famous. “We’ll have the ability to do extra new issues and have the ability to produce extra merchandise, which units us up for different bottlers to return to us when one thing comes together with the Coke firm.”
Olathe’s Metropolis Council will likely be subsequent to contemplate Heartland’s proposal. Within the meantime, the corporate nonetheless has its fingers full with nailing down the main points, together with finalizing inner designs and deciding on gear. If all goes as deliberate, development may get underway within the spring of 2023 and attain completion in summer time 2024.
The bottling enterprise in metropolitan Kansas Metropolis stays robust. Earlier in 2022, Niagara Bottling expanded its footprint within the space with the opening of a 634,000-square-foot facility close to the Kansas Metropolis Worldwide Airport.