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No Comments [ Add Comment ]Food company in Ogden
By Jeff DeMossU.S. Foodservice breaks ground
OGDEN -- Officials for U.S. Foodservice Inc. and the various government agencies that worked to bring the company to Ogden said it was a complex and difficult deal that looked at times as if it would not happen.
The first physical evidence that it did happen was on display Thursday afternoon when officials broke ground for the food distribution company's 260,000-square-foot facility just west of Interstate 15 and north of Hinckley Drive.
"This location took a long time to find," said Dave Hansel, president of the U.S. Foodservice division that covers Utah, Idaho, Montana and parts of Nevada and Wyoming. "We needed a minimum of 35 acres, and finding a parcel that big, that was also affordable and close to where we want to be, was very challenging."
The distribution center will be about double the size of the company's existing facility at the Freeport Center in Clearfield. It is designed to accommodate expansion up to 500,000 square feet and is scheduled to be complete in late 2008. Wisconsin-based ESI Group USA, which U.S. Foodservice contracts with for virtually all of its construction, will build the new facility.
"We were landlocked in a leased building" at the Freeport Center, Hansel said. "This will be much more efficient, and it's built for expansion."
It is expected to open with about 250 employees, approximately half of which will be relocating from the Clearfield facility. Hansel said employment at the center will grow as demand dictates.
The deal has been about two years in the making. Maryland-based U.S. Foodservice was originally looking at a nearby site in the Ogden Commercial Industrial Park, but the complexities of dealing with multiple property owners led to the demise of that deal.
Last year, it appeared to have settled on a Pleasant View site, but a wetlands designation on the preferred site stopped that plan in its tracks.
Ogden officials and others scrambled to find a new site quickly, finally settling on the 37-acre plot just east of Autoliv ASP's main airbag plant.
"There are two kinds of projects: hard and easy," Ogden Mayor Matthew Godfrey said. "We'd like to have an easy one at some point, but it's more than worth it now."
Among others, he credited Dave Harmer, the city's community and economic development director, for sticking with the project, even when Godfrey himself thought it was too complicated to work.
"This is one of his many legacy projects in the city," Godfrey said.
Hansel said the $3.3 million in city incentives and up to $2 million in state incentives offered to the company played a "very big role" in its choice of Ogden over sites in Washington and Oregon, but the decision made sense for other reasons.
"It's a very logistically centralized location for us, and what a beautiful setting."
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