Blooming Prairie Expanding Iowa Product Distribution Center

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). Doing business as Blooming Prairie (Iowa City, Iowa), the country's largest publicly traded natural and organic food distributor, United Natural Foods Incorporated (NASDAQ: UNIF) (Dayville, Connecticut) is expanding the Blooming Prairie distribution center in Iowa City, Iowa.

Plans are to add about 140,000 square feet of storage to the existing 120,000 square foot refrigerated warehouse located at 2340 Heinz Road in Johnson County to support growing demand for organic and natural food in the region.

The company recently selected ARCO Design-Build (Atlanta, Georgia) as the general contractor for the project and site preparation is scheduled to begin within the next couple of weeks.

The project will involve constructing a 99,000 square foot dry storage area, 25,000 square feet of freezer storage, 16,000 square feet of cooler storage and about 25 shipping and receiving docks.

The $9.6 million expansion is scheduled to be completed sometime during the second quarter of 2004 and once the expansion becomes operational, Blooming Prairie will add about 130 new jobs to the site.

In September 2002, the members of Blooming Prairie Cooperative voted to sell their equity in the co-op and distribution centers in Iowa City and Mounds View, Minnesota to United Natural Foods, Incorporated.

United Natural Foods is the largest publicly traded wholesale distributor to the natural and organic foods industry. They carry more than 30,000 items in stock supplying over 10,000 customers nationwide and servicing a wide variety of retail formats, including super natural chains, independent natural products retailers, and conventional supermarkets.