Baldor Specialty Foods is gearing up for significant growth in the Mid-Atlantic region with a new, 100,000-square-foot warehouse in Lanham, Maryland.
The specialty distributor said the 35-door facility will replace an existing warehouse in Jessup, Maryland, that is one-seventh its size. The new facility, located 12 miles outside Washington, D.C., will allow the company to greatly expand its delivery and provide faster and earlier deliveries to customers.
The company supplies restaurants, retailers and other customers along the East Coast, from Maine to Virginia, with specialty produce, meat, dairy, and fish from four hubs in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, and Jessup. It will continue operating from the Jessup facility while it retrofits the Lanham warehouse, Dominic Vasold, Baldor’s operations manager for the region, told SFA News Daily.
Baldor has been operating in the greater Washington, D.C., market for about 10 years. It has grown sales in the market in double-digit percentages each year, excluding during the pandemic, he said. While restaurants and other foodservice accounts in the Washington, D.C. area were particularly hard-hit by pandemic shutdowns, Baldor worked with many of its customers to pivot to offering pre-made, grab-and-go meals, he said.
“Together we came out stronger than before,” Vasold said. “We’ve seen incredible demand over the last year with the resurgence of restaurants and corporate cafeterias after COVID, and we’ll be focusing our efforts on making sure we can meet that demand from our customers to enable their success, which this new Maryland facility will help us to do.”
Beginning in 2012 with just a handful of workers in the Washington, D.C., market, Baldor now employs 70 people, “with plans to grow significantly in the next few years,” Vasold said. In a statement, Baldor said it expects to hire “upwards of 100” local workers, including drivers and warehouse personnel, as the new facility ramps up operations.
While customers in the region already had full access to Baldor’s 6,000-plus SKUs, the new facility will allow the company to bring in more products from local farms, Vasold said.
“We believe that local produce is the best way to maximize flavor, since diners get to eat it at its freshest,” he said. “Plus, it is more environmentally friendly to source locally.”
Krenar Jusufi, vice president of engineering at Baldor, who joined the company in June from subscription meal kit provider HelloFresh, helped identify the location.
In a statement, he said the facility, located in the Hargrove Industrial Campus, is ideal not only because of its increased capacity, but also for its proximity to major highways. The expansion in the Washington, D.C., market follows the company’s previous expansions in Boston and Philadelphia, as well as additions to its Hunts Point, New York, headquarters in the Bronx.
Related: Farm to People, Baldor to Partner; Baldor Delivers Meals From Local Restaurants.