SIOUX CITY -- Cloverleaf Cold Storage's present operations took a step forward in December, when an $18 million expansion of its Sioux City warehouse facility became fully operational.
Then in January, the company's future was strengthened when it finalized the sale of a majority interest in the family-owned business to a New York-based global investment firm.
"It's only going to make operations stronger here. We're positioning this company for growth," said Adam Feiges, one of Cloverleaf's principal officers.
It's been an eventful year for Cloverleaf, no doubt, and Feiges said he's happy to see the expansion project finished. The company maintained regular operations while navigating through the construction zone at the warehouse in the Bridgeport Industrial area.
"It was a very long and difficult construction project. Difficult because of the physical limitations of the site," Feiges said. "It made operations very difficult, and our operations team did a great job through that whole complex project."
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Some features of the new 140,000-square-foot addition included building a 70-foot deep refrigerated loading dock with internally opening access doors to replace the existing dock, constructing holding coolers that service subsidiary's Farmers Produce processing facility and adding more than 18,000 pallet positions to the warehouse, bringing the total capacity to 48,000 pallets.
"We now have enough space in the building to handle all the product from our Farms Produce subsidiary," Feiges said of the facility, which holds beef, pork and turkey from many local and national packing plants.
The expansion created eight jobs, all of which have been filled, Feiges said.
Feiges said another six to nine executives will be hired as a result of the recapitalization agreement with Blackstone, a leading investment firm that manages $387 billion worth of assets and made a majority equity investment into Cloverleaf. The hiring process for those positions has already begun, Feiges said.
The Cloverleaf name will remain unchanged as a result of the sale, which Feiges said was done to ensure a succession plan so the company can continue into the future.
"We recognized we had to come up with a plan to make sure we are going to take care of our customers, our employees and our town," he said.
Members of the Feiges and Kaplan families, who founded the company in 1952, will remain shareholders and in charge of day-to-day operations.
"We wanted to secure kind of the future of the company and legacy we built on our fathers' business and we wanted a partner that could help us achieve our growth goals over time," Feiges told the Journal in November.
Cloverleaf was founded in 1952 and currently operates a network of 19 warehouses across the central and eastern United States providing a variety of food grade storage, handling and freezing services. In 1962, Cloverleaf built one of the first modern panel-and-rack warehouse buildings in Sioux City. According to trade publications, Cloverleaf is the 11th largest cold-storage warehouse company in the world and the eighth largest in North America.
Feiges said there is no more room to expand in Sioux City, but the company continues to study expansion at its other sites.
"We are actively searching for expansion opportunities," he said.
