1.2 MSF Coca-Cola Facility Gets Green Light in Kansas

Heartland Coca-Cola site. Image via Google Street View

Heartland Coca-Cola Bottling Co. has gotten one step closer to realizing its new production campus in Olathe, Kan., with a recent thumbs-up from the Olathe Planning Commission. In a unanimous vote, the five-member body approved a revised preliminary site development plan for the approximately 1.2 million-square-foot industrial project roughly 25 miles southwest of Kansas City.

Heartland closed on the acquisition of the 116-acre development site in September 2022. The future production, warehouse and office complex will come online only 13 miles from the company’s headquarters in Lenexa, Kan.

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Heartland’s selection of the Olathe property was purely a real estate decision. “When we looked at the potential for this project, we looked in St. Louis, where we have a large facility, we looked in Lenexa and we also looked around the entire Kansas City metro area and we just could not find the amount of land that we would need to build a brand-new facility until we looked into Olathe,” Edward Bryant, a vice president with Heartland Coca-Cola Bottling Co., told Commercial Property Executive.

The planning commission green-lighted Heartland’s updated vision for the production campus. The secure facility will be developed in phases, with the first approximately 600,000-square-foot phase encompassing roughly 312,000 square feet of production, equipment and recycling space, 287,000 square feet of warehousing accommodations, 14,000 square feet of office space, as well as other accessory structures. The second phase of the project would yield an extra 216,000 square feet of production and equipment space, 277,000 square feet of warehouse space and additional accessory structures.

The Olathe campus will be twice as large as the 600,000-square-foot project the company put in front of the planning commission in October 2022, and substantially larger than the current production facility, which consists of just 185,000 square feet on 9 acres of land. “This is a generational investment so we’re not just investing for the next 5 years, we’re investing for the next 40,” Bryant said. “We’re building for what we may need in the future so that’s why we got approval for what we think we might do when and if we do a phase two.”

Expansion with intent

Heartland isn’t just expanding for the sake of expanding; the company endeavors to bolster its status as an anchor Coca-Cola bottler in the Midwest. Heartland would be unable to further its goal while operating in its current production facility, which is not only constrained in size; having been built in 1969, it is also limited by its age.

“This [new facility] is going to solidify us as one of the go-to bottlers in the Midwest for a variety of different products,” Bryant noted. “We’ll be able to do more new things and be able to produce more products, which sets us up for other bottlers to come to us when something comes along with the Coke company.”

Olathe’s City Council will be next to consider Heartland’s proposal. In the meantime, the company still has its hands full with nailing down the details, including finalizing internal designs and settling on equipment. If all goes as planned, construction could get underway in the spring of 2023 and reach completion in summer 2024.

The bottling business in metropolitan Kansas City remains strong. Earlier in 2022, Niagara Bottling expanded its footprint in the area with the opening of a 634,000-square-foot facility near the Kansas City International Airport.