Northern Begins $75M Central Grocers HQ

JOLIET, IL-Construction has begun on a 934,490-sf building, which will be Central Grocers Inc. new headquarters, in the Cherry Hill Business Park at Interstate 80 and Route 30, here. The company, which is currently headquartered in Franklin Park, IL, was formed in 1917 by a group of grocery storeowners for buying and marketing efficiency. The estimated cost for the new building is approximately $75 million, which includes site acquisition, construction and equipping the building, says Matt Mulvihill, SVP with Grubb & Ellis Co.

The 934,490-sf facility is being developed and constructed by Northern Builders in its Cherry Hill business park. The building will have 43,000 sf of office space, 550,000 sf of warehouse space and 340,000 sf of freezer cooler space. The building is expected to be complete in the first half of 2009. Central Grocers will receive $3.8 million in Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity’s Economic Development for a Growing Economy corporate tax credits. “We kind of scoured the Interstate 80 market and looked at different locations and different incentive packages,” Mulvihill says. “It really came down to a little bit of timing.”

Central Grocers is currently occupying two facilities in Franklin Park, IL, with about one million sf on a total of 43 acres, Mulvihill says. The two facilities are at 11000 Belmont and 3701 Centrella St. The nearly 800,000-sf facility on Centrella Street, which is on 23.5 acres, has been added on to several times over the years and is inefficient, Mulvihill says. “The functionality of the building was very limited,” he says. Central Grocers has owned the approximately 80,000-sf facility on 19.4 acres on Belmont Street for approximately 15 years.