A California-based beverage production company planning to expand by locating its Midwest headquarters in Columbus chose the city largely because of the city’s investment in infrastructure and its business climate focused on manufacturing.
Last week, Ninth Avenue Foods, headquartered in City of Industry, California, announced plans to locate its Midwest headquarters and production facility in Columbus, its first facility outside of its home state. More than a couple dozen sites were under consideration as possible locations.
The company intends to invest about $103.5 million to build and equip a 260,000-square-foot dairy and plant-based beverage facility on a 40-acre site located just east of the Woodside Industrial Park, on Columbus’ south side near the intersection of County Road 175W and Deaver Road.
The facility is expected to employ up to 101 new employees by the end of 2024, company officials.
For Joe Lunzer, vice president of operations at Ninth Avenue Foods, who scouted the more than two dozen sites in roughly the past year and half, the city’s focus on automotive manufacturing was attractive because the infrastructure it had in place and the skilled labor force.
“The infrastructure that’s required for our industry is probably not that different from automotive, a lot of power, natural gas,” Lunzer said. “We use a little bit more water than the automotive industry and have some needs that the automotive industry doesn’t have, and Columbus had very reasonable rates in all of those areas.”
“The business climate in Columbus is very focused around manufacturing,” he added. “That, in general, really drew us in. There’s a great workforce there, so access to skilled labor is obviously very important for us, and there’s a lot of that in Columbus with the automotive industry.”
A fourth-generation, family-owned company, Ninth Avenue Foods specializes in extended shelf-life dairy and dairy alternative products, company officials said. The company got its name because its main facility is located on Ninth Avenue in City of Industry, Lunzer said.
Though the company started off focusing mainly on the dairy industry, Lunzer said the company’s bread and butter is its processing technology, rather than a particular beverage going into the container.
The technology, which Lunzer said is generally what is found at larger bigger multinational companies, uses high temperature boilers, among other things.
More recently, the company has gotten into the market for plant-based milks, such as soy, almond and oat milk, and other milk alternatives, which Lunzer said “is a category that’s growing dramatically.”
The new facility in Columbus, which will house up to seven new filling lines, will be set up to be as flexible as possible to be able to make a variety of products and allow production for some products that do not require refrigeration.
“We have a certain amount of plant-based and dairy business that we’re currently shipping nationally from California,” Lunzer said. “Some of it will be relocated into Indiana for logistical reasons and certainly environmental reasons. It reduces the carbon footprint by not trucking product across the country.”
The company had been looking to add a new facility east of the Mississippi River for about the past year and half, Lunzer said.
Initially, company officials started with a list of about 25 potential sites in Indiana. That list was then narrowed down to six sites in Indiana between Columbus and Fort Wayne.
The company also considered sites in Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina. At one point, Lunzer and another company official drove 22 sites in two days, covering 1,200 miles in those three states.
Bristol, Tennessee was, at least at one time, the company’s second choice, Lunzer said.
One of key factors in bringing the project to Columbus was the availability of water and wastewater services offered by Columbus City Utilities. In support of the project, Columbus City Utilities will extend a 12’’ water main approximately 2,000 feet to both serve this project and future developments along County Road 175W.
“We use a lot of water in some of those plant-based products, but also with a hyper-clean environment, we do a lot of cleaning,” Lunzer said. “Everything that we use is food-based, but we have to clean a lot. We use some steam, some gas fire boilers, which, because of our processes, aren’t able to recycle as much condensate as a traditional boiler. So that ends up in the waste stream, and so there’s a high level of flow. It’s not a pollutant in any way, but it is something that needs to get treated. …It’s always easier to treat waste streams on a macroscopic level than to try and do it on site.”
“That part of it eliminates some sites,” Lunzer said. “They just don’t have that kind of capacity.”
The Greater Columbus Economic Development Corp. worked with the company the past few months to encourage the firm to locate in Columbus, said Jason Hester, president of the Greater Columbus EDC. Columbus Mayor Jim Lienhoop was also involved in the community’s pitch to the company.
The Columbus City Council approved company’s request for a 10-year tax abatement on Tuesday, which will offer the company a gradual phase-in of its property taxes over 10 years.
An added economic benefit to Columbus is that Ninth Avenue Foods has selected local firm Force Construction for site development and the building project, which supports local design and construction jobs, Hester said.
In addition to the potential incentive from the city, the Indiana Economic Development Corp. is offering Ninth Avenue Foods up to $1.1 million in conditional tax credits based on the company’s job creation plans, the IEDC said in a statement. The IEDC will also provide up to $150,000 from the Industrial Development Grant Fund to support the city’s off-site infrastructure improvements.
“(Columbus) has a very balanced feel,” Lunzer said. “It’s not too big as a city that we felt uncomfortable there. It didn’t have that California, Los Angeles, some of those issues that we run into (there), but yet it was big enough to support the job structure and the amount of infrastructure that we need.”
[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”About Ninth Avenue Foods” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]
Ninth Avenue Foods is a fourth-generation family-owned and operated company with a long-standing history of quality and service in the dairy industry.
The company specializes in extended shelf-life and dairy alternative products. The company has a state-of-the-art ESL manufacturing facility and more than 50 years of experience in the industry.
For more, visit ninthavenuefoods.com.
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