With several scoops of ceremonial dirt, local leaders and H-E-B executives christened the forthcoming construction of the grocer’s largest warehouse yet.
H-E-B celebrated its new San Antonio Super Regional Grocery Warehouse on Thursday morning with a groundbreaking ceremony. The warehouse will be located along Foster Road between Houston Street and Highway 87, adjacent to China Grove. The facility itself will take up 1.6 million square feet, while the site on which it is being built clocks in at 871 acres.
Carson Landsgard, senior vice president of supply chain and logistics at H-E-B, said the warehouse will be a dry goods facility that supplies San Antonio-area stores with their groceries.
“For more than 50 years, our Rittiman warehousing operations has serviced San Antonio and the surrounding areas,” Landsgard said. “In the 1960s, our grocery warehouse measured 120,000 square feet and carried roughly 3,800 grocery items for our stores. In the 1960s, H-E-B was already planning for the future, looking to expand and grow, continuing to position itself to serve more and more Texans each day.”
The warehouse will stock 17,000 grocery items and ship out 180 trailers worth of product a day, Landsgard said. The warehouse will be outfitted with 200 outbound shipping docks, with the option to increase to 280.
“This facility will be bringing together products from our grocery warehouse here on Rittiman Road, as well as products from our San Marcos warehouse up the road on I-35,” Landsgard said. “With this facility, we will continue to support additional volume and growth, but at the same time allowing us to retrofit those two facilities to support our needs for refrigerated and general merchandise product.”
H-E-B also presented the San Antonio Parks Foundation with $20,000 to improve Copernicus Park down the road.
Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff thanked H-E-B and its leadership for their role in developing San Antonio’s workforce over the years.
“They’ve really been pioneers in a number of different things that make San Antonio a much better place to live, and this 1.6 million square foot warehouse with some 600, 700 employees is going to make another statement for San Antonio,” Wolff said.
The new warehouse will make between 600 to 700 jobs available, Landsgard said. More than half will be new jobs created in San Antonio, while the rest will go to current employees at other facilities in the city.
City Councilman Cruz Shaw (D2), who represents the area in which the new warehouse is being built, said he’s happy to see H-E-B plant roots in far East San Antonio with such a large presence.
“We have hard-working individuals in this district, people who love this community and love the city of San Antonio, and I applaud H-E-B for providing 300 opportunities for these families,” Shaw said. “Because what’s most important is providing financial resources to our families with longevity. They can stay in the community, stay in school here, retire here, and continue to give back to the city of San Antonio.”
China Grove Mayor Mary Ann Hajek said she was delighted to welcome H-E-B to the community.
“We all agree that H-E-B is known as being the great neighbor it is, and I look forward to a mutually great relationship with H-E-B in the future,” she said.
Ryan Companies, the Minneapolis-based construction company H-E-B chose to build the warehouse, has already been working on the site for three months. H-E-B estimates a finish date of late 2019 or spring 2020, weather permitting.
I have seen nothing in the reports about this new HEB facility that address the necessary road improvements to Foster Road between I-10 and US 87 and to East Houston Street west of Foster Road to handle the more than 180 tractor trailer loads of outgoing deliveries from the warehouse plus however many incoming truck loads of groceries to be delivered to the warehouse.