Construction of new food and beverage plants continues to see a strong upward trend despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

T. Marzetti is expanding its Horse Cave, Kentucky, processing facility by an extra 184,500 square feet after a recent groundbreaking ceremony. The facility manufactures salad dressings, sauces and other foods for retail and foodservice markets. The expansion will provide additional manufacturing space and include new equipment to increase dressing and sauce production, new processing kitchens, and several packaging lines to meet growing customer demand. The expansion is expected to be complete in the summer of 2022 and will create over 200 jobs for the region.

Dole Foods has opened a new state-of-the-art frozen fruit facility in McDonough, Georgia, Dole's third frozen fruit facility in the United States, complimenting the existing operations in Atwater, California, and Decatur, Michigan. The new facility is approximately 60,000 square feet, fully automated and will have four manufacturing lines which when at capacity can produce 60 million pounds of frozen fruit annually. The operations will package frozen fruit for Dole's retail, food service and private label customers on the east coast.

Denver’s first cold storage speculative development is currently under construction. 76 Freeze, a 247,032-square-foot state-of-the-art, multi-temperature facility, is scheduled for completion in October 2021. Located at 189 Bromley Business Parkway in Brighton, Colorado, the brand-new facility situated on 17 acres is strategically positioned to service Colorado’s Front Range and Rocky Mountain regions. Approximately 166,000 square feet of space in the multi-user facility has been preleased to a single tenant.

CRB has appointed Jason Robertson as its food + beverage market director. Robertson will lead the company-wide growth of the food and beverage market.

Submissions are now open for the 2020 Food Engineering Plant of the Year.

Tuffy’s Pet Foods has broken ground on a 173,500 sq. ft. facility in Delano, Minn.