Refrigerated Meat Processing Buildings How they Sell and Lease.

Refrigerated Meat Processing Facilities.

There are basically two types of refrigerated meat processing facilities. A meat processing facility is either a livestock kill operation or a further processing facility.Howerer both are inspected by the USDA

The first type is where beef and pork companies operate their livestock killing operations. These facilities are always located in rural or agricultural industrial real estate marketplaces. Historically these facilities did not have connections to municipal water and sewer systems because they were located so far away from the nearest town. Also the water demands of the facility sometimes were larger than the entire capacity of the nearest town’s water system. Sometimes the livestock kill facilities discharges into the sewer system was beyond the capabilities of the nearest municipality which resulted in wastewater settling ponds at the site. This was problematic in real estate brokerage because of environmental issues sometimes resulted at the facility site from these wastewater settling ponds. These problems revolved around that the facility had to maintain its own water and sewer systems, and therefore any environmental ramifications remained at the site after operations had ceased. These were also truly specialized buildings and not always easily adaptable to alternative users. Resale of the property to another livestock kill operator most likely would not usually occur because the current owners did not wish to sell to their competition. Also depending on the age of the plant, the processing process and systems had become inefficient for livestock kill operations. Further there has been reluctance for any grandfathered inspection criteria items to be passed on to a new purchaser of the aging livestock slaughter facilities.

The second type of facility was a refrigerated further processing facility. This facility could have been in any type or size of industrial real estate market. The refrigerated facility processed beef and pork carcasses. This processing is known in the food processing industry as "further processing". The products that were produced in these facilities are extremely varied as the many types of foods you would see in any supermarket or in a restaurant menu. When these facilities did become available their design and floorplan was easily adaptable to other types of non USDA food processing operations or FDA inspected facilities . The facilities were well constructed with all of the water, sewer, employee welfare and electrical amenities already built into this type of formerly UDSA inspected refrigerated food processing building. Companies that process food generally found all of these amenities desirable whether or not their processes and or food processing operations required refrigeration with either freezer or cooler warehouse storage temperatures or refrigerated food processing areas.

Whenever a refrigerated UDSA inspected further processing facility or building becames available in any real estate market, whether it was a large or small building and was in good repair, and also there was also a ready and willing food processing company also in that industrial real estate market that was in need of a different location, these used refrigerated facilities with the superior choice over any new facility construction options. The predominant factors establishing that superior choice were immediate availability and purchase price.

Jim Cronin and Phil Pisciotta, real estate agents of Hawk Distribution Services, LLC www.hawkds.com have extensive real estate brokerage experiences with these types of facilities. Jim Cronin of St. Louis, Missouri can be contacted at 314-994-0577 or j.cronin@hawkds.com and Phil Pisciotta of Kansas City, Missouri can be contacted at p.pisciotta@hawkds.com  or 816-510-2060.