When Keurig Dr Pepper broke ground on its production facility and regional distribution center in Allentown, Pa., the company envisioned the new site to be an embodiment of the company’s focus on safety, productivity and sustainability.

Formed just three years ago from the merger of Keurig Green Mountain and Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Keurig Dr Pepper’s powerhouse portfolio of more than 125 brands includes Keurig^®, Dr Pepper^®, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters^®, Canada Dry^®, Snapple^®, Bai^®, Mott's^®, CORE^® and The Original Donut Shop^®.

Soon after the merger completed, the company began investing across its supply chain to build capacity and capabilities throughout its beverage manufacturing and material supply processes. Along with the new cold beverage manufacturing facility in Allentown, the company was also completing construction on a state-of-the-art roasting and pod packaging facility in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, and a manufacturing plant in Newbridge, Ireland, to produce beverage concentrate.

In Allentown, the plan was to complete all of the construction and renovation involved in developing the site for its needs in 14 months. That’s an aggressive timeline for a project of this size, to be sure. But the project was in line with the anticipated finishing date until March 20, 2020, when everything changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

On that date, the governor of Pennsylvania ordered a statewide shutdown that included construction projects, bringing the Keurig Dr Pepper project to a halt for six weeks. For six weeks, no on-site work was done. No earthmoving. No concrete pouring. No utility runs. No equipment installations or commissioning. Nothing.

The nature of construction projects is that a six-week delay doesn’t just mean you’re six weeks behind. It throws carefully calibrated schedules into chaos, causes cascading delays in material delivery, limits the availability of already scarce tradespeople, and forces a mad scramble to figure out when equipment can be delivered or what can be done with equipment that is already on the way.

“I think anyone in the business knows all plans are great until the first bullet flies, but this is way beyond that,” says Trent Moore, program manager, Dennis Group, which was the design-build firm for the project. “I mean, we were making adjustments to the plan daily because of how compressed it was.”

For Keurig Dr Pepper and Dennis Group, that six weeks was a serious blow to their best-laid plans. But it turned out to be something else as well: an opportunity. It gave them a chance to step back, get a sense of the challenge that would be facing them as the pandemic raced around the world and develop plans for moving forward despite a situation that was unprecedented in recent history.

COVID-19 is part of this story, to be sure. But it’s not the whole story. Despite the challenges, despite the new normal, despite the massive disruptions to literally every aspect of the lives of the people working on the project, they still managed to bring production online by January 2021, with additional lines following by March and April.

Challenging times demand innovative solutions. The solutions—both those related to COVID-19 and those unrelated to the pandemic—are evident in every inch of the 1.5-million-sq.-ft. facility, and they are the reason that Keurig Dr Pepper earned the 2021 Food Engineering Plant of the Year award.

Finding and adapting the right site

You don’t find 1.5 million square feet just anywhere. The team knew it needed a site that would meet a number of specific criteria, and the search was a wide one—over more than a 150-mile radius in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware to meet Keurig Dr Pepper’s goal of serving its Northeast customer base. The site also needed to support the facility’s needs for water, utilities, rail accessibility and a skilled workforce.

The Allentown site checked all of the boxes, but it wasn’t an open site. There were two shell warehouses in the process of being constructed, with one being about 80% complete; the other was earlier in the process, with only about 30% of the earthwork complete. The building plans could be modified to meet KDP’s needs while staying within the parameters of the permits.

The shell warehouse that was already under construction was retrofitted into the regional distribution center, while the building site that only had some of the earthwork complete was modified to be the production facility. A number of modifications were needed, including expanding dock doors and office space.

The site itself also needed some additional work due to Pennsylvania’s terrain, which sits on rock that can weaken and give way, creating sink holes. Geotechnical analysis and remediation of potential problem areas had to be done, and concrete had to be poured through the winter.

The site and the buildings needed to not only meet current needs, but future expansion and consumer demand as well. With more than 125 brands in the company’s portfolio and the possibility of consumer trends changing on short notice, the facility had to be flexible and adaptable to meet changing production requirements.

“We had that in mind from day one, when we were tasked with looking at a facility,” says David Arnold, senior director, manufacturing engineering, Keurig Dr Pepper. “It wasn’t just to hit our current short-term goals, but also for future growth. So that was a huge part of the design and laying out what the future would look like to the best that we know, and what we think our future business needs would be.”

Preparing for future needs isn’t just a one-time decision. It’s an ongoing process, which requires evaluation of the facility’s current operating parameters, what is needed to meet future needs and how to bridge any gaps that may exist. Arnold, his team and site leadership are in constant communication about what the site needs both now and in the future to meet current needs and plan for the future.

“We’re currently evaluating how the system is performing versus the design and what our expectations were,” says Arnold. “Making sure that we accommodate any of our future plans when we said, ‘hey, this is what we’ll do for the future.’ We want to make sure that still rings true.”

That evaluation process and keeping an eye on the future is an integral part of the day-to-day operations, says Brian Group, site leader, Keurig Dr Pepper.

“It’s continuing to develop and grow our people, to deliver optimal results for the business,” says Group. “We’re still fairly early in that journey, but nonetheless, it’s a journey that we’re dedicated to continue. We want this to be one of the best-in-class manufacturing facilities within the KDP network. So we’re going to continue to grow.” End of Part 1