KDP Allentown Earns Food Engineering Magazine’s Plant of the Year Distinction
Advanced sustainability features. State-of-the-art design, equipment and automation systems. World-class ingenuity and project team resilience in the face of a pandemic. Together, these attributes earned KDP’s newest cold beverage production and distribution facility in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Food Engineering Magazine’s 2021 Plant of the Year – an annual award given to the most innovative new food or beverage plant built in North America.
Growing product demand combined with the Company’s aggressive sustainability agenda and consumers’ evolving needs for innovative and eco-friendly products sent KDP on a mission to build a vertically integrated manufacturing facility and new regional distribution center to serve our Northeast-focused customer base.
Covering 1.5 million square feet, Allentown is a forward-thinking facility that integrates sustainability throughout and efficiently delivers the quality beverages our consumers love. Modern design elements greatly reduce energy consumption in the facility itself. Sophisticated systems and equipment enable production of a wider range of consumer-friendly bottle shapes and sizes to reduce the overall amount of plastic used and the weight of beverage bottles, making distribution trucks lighter and more efficient.
Honored for its high levels of automation and innovative solutions to meet KDP’s sustainability commitments, Allentown is one of three new facilities increasing productivity and capacity to enable future growth. Others include our new beverage concentrate facility in Newbridge, Ireland, and our new coffee roasting and pod packaging facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina – the largest industrial manufacturing facility certified under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) v4 Building Design and Construction rating system in North America.
On granting the award, Food Engineering Magazine noted, “The Keurig Dr Pepper plant showcases a commitment to design, construction and operating excellence, and it would be a remarkable achievement to bring such a large facility online in such a short time under normal circumstances, much less with the challenges the industry has faced over the last year.” Thank you, Food Engineering Magazine, for this honor and recognizing the hard and skillful work of our team and development partner, Dennis Group.