Warehouse Project At Ajinomoto Foods Nears Completion
Patton Ford and Steven Hill stand inside the Ajinomoto warehouse that is quickly being filled after the completed building was turned over to the company late last month.
OAKLAND – A project to construct a 60,000 square-foot warehouse at Ajinomoto Foods in Oakland is nearing completion after almost a year of work. Hill’s Construction, LLC, was awarded the bid for just under $4 million in April, 2019, by the Yalobusha County Board of Supervisors as the frozen food manufacturer continues to grow in Oakland.
Hill’s Construction Project Manager Patton Ford reported Ajinomoto moved into the new building late last month and remaining work primarily includes concrete work outside the warehouse. Both Ford and Steven Hill said the project was plagued with rain days, starting last June.
“We had almost 160 rain days on the job up until February,” Hill explained.
“We lost a lot of time but managed to almost stay on schedule,” Ford added.
“We managed to put together a solid team to put this together,” Ford explained about subcontractors who worked on the project.
“The metal building guys worked out here on Christmas day,” Hill said about the push to make up for the rain days.
The job included moving 30,000 yards of dirt for the building site and pouring 60,000 square feet of structural concrete before the metal building was erected. The warehouse provides cold storage space for food and packaging space. Prior to moving into the warehouse, Ajinomoto had leased a building in Batesville for storage space.
The warehouse addition comes as Ajinomoto announced a fifth expansion in January to increase capacity for rice production, a $27.3 million corporate investment that will increase the number of employees working at the Oakland facility to 450. The actual warehouse is owned by the county, and will be leased to Ajinomoto to recoup the construction cost.
The project is the second multi-million dollar job in Yalobusha County that Hill’s Construction has been awarded during the last year, as the company started work on renovations for Base Camp Coding Academy in January.
Ford, a native of Oakland, said the project at Ajinomoto was fulfilling for him.
“Twenty years ago, you would have never made me believe that there would be a project like this in Oakland, much less the stuff we have going on in Water Valley,” Ford explained. The thought of being able to sustain a construction company on an annual basis, or even a bi-annual basis in Yalobusha County is mind-boggling to me,” Ford added.
“When I got out of Oakland I thought I was escaping, now we are working on a big project here,” Ford added.
Both men also stressed that Hill’s Construction makes projects in the county a priority when the job fits in their schedule and what they can do.
“If it is in Yalobusha County, we are going to make sure if somebody else wants it, they are going to have to want it really bad,” Ford noted.
“We buckled down on this one, we came after it to get it,” Hill said about working with a strong team of subcontractors from the area to ensure their bid would be competitive.
