Distribution Center Expansion Planned on the Heels of Startup of $140 Million Gatorade Plant

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). A month after startup of the newest Quaker Oats Company (Chicago, Illinois), a division of PepsiCo, Incorporated (NYSE:PEP) (Purchase, New York), Gatorade plant in an industrial park east of Wytheville, Virginia, plans are already in progress to expand the facility’s warehouse and distribution center. Preliminary plans call for expanding the distribution center from 500,000 square feet, with an additional 300,000 to 450,000 square feet by the first quarter of 2007.

Construction of the 900,000 square-foot processing building and warehouse-distribution center began in the summer of 2005 and the plant became operational in November. The general contractor of record, The Haskell Company (Jacksonville, Florida), is currently going through its final punch list and expects to demobilize the site by the end of the week.

The Blue Ridge plant in Wytheville is the eighth Gatorade plant in the U.S. and is projected to produce around 60 million cases of Gatorade annually. Gatorade’s parent company, PepsiCo, already has a presence east of Wytheville at a 300,000 square-foot bottling plant with four production lines producing products such as Pepsi-Cola, Diet Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Sierra Mist and Aquafina bottled water. The company’s ninth Gatorade plant is under construction in Oklahoma and is expected to be operational in the fall of 2007, see related November 1, 2006 news article - Construction of $180 Million Sports Drink Plant and Distribution Center in Oklahoma in Full Swing.

Gatorade, developed 35 years ago at the University of Florida, is formulated to replace fluids and electrolytes and provide carbohydrate energy as well as quenching thirst.

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