Every gallon a food or beverage plant brings in has to leave again, and in most cases it leaves carrying something. Washdown water, product rinse, cooling blowdown and cleaning chemicals all need a path to a treatment plant or an on-site system, and finding that path is often the single biggest question when a producer looks at a parcel. In the Albuquerque metro, the answer changes dramatically from one corridor to the next.
The Los Morros Business Park next to the data center campus in Los Lunas is listed with a bottling company among its tenants, along with a regional distribution center. That is a useful signal: beverage and packaged food users find the valley attractive because of interstate access and rail, with water, sewer, electric and gas available within large industrial parks. Meanwhile, much of the village of Corrales has no centralized water or sewer system, which shows how a parcel that seems convenient can still require serious utility work.
We build for producers, co-packers and ingredient suppliers who care about sanitary design and inspection readiness. Our job is to turn a process flow into a building that is easy to clean, hard to contaminate and ready for the regulators and customers who will walk it.
Food and beverage construction is regulated by what goes inside the walls as much as by the walls themselves. Surfaces must be cleanable and non-porous, floors must slope to drains, doors and openings must keep pests out, and air movement must run from clean to dirty areas. We coordinate with the owner's food safety lead and with auditors' expectations, including hygienic zoning, wash stations, locker and break room placement and controlled traffic paths. Where the process runs hot or cold, we detail wall, floor and ceiling systems that resist moisture and thermal shock.
Worker safety matters as well. Wet floors, forklifts, chemical storage and ammonia or other refrigerant systems call for careful layout and signage. We build secondary containment around chemical and refrigerant storage and protect drains and outfalls during construction. Fire protection and egress follow the 2021 New Mexico Commercial Building Code, which adopts the 2021 International Building Code as amended and took effect July 14, 2023.
The floor is the most important surface in a food plant. We pour slabs with the right slope to drains, install trench drains and floor sinks where the process requires, and finish the surface with sealed or resinous toppings that stand up to washdown. Joints, curbs and wall bases are detailed to avoid places where water or product can collect. Our industrial concrete floors practice includes the sloped, jointed and cured slabs that these plants require.
The shell can be tilt wall, insulated panel or a hybrid, depending on the process. Wall panels with smooth interior faces are common because they wash well and resist moisture. Rooftop equipment, ammonia or glycol piping, and mezzanines for utilities and packaging lines add structural loads. Owners with both processing and chilled warehousing will find our food and beverage processing experience and cold storage construction knowledge useful together.
The Central New Mexico Rail Park in Los Lunas is a 1,400-acre rail-served site, with water, sewer, electric and gas services, and it offers transload and car storage for bulk ingredients or finished product. The Huning Business & Tech Park near Los Lunas is marketed at about 716 acres with all utilities available and water and sewer provided by the village. Both are within reach of I-25, and both sit within a short drive of the Sunport and the I-25/I-40 interchange.
Closer to Albuquerque, producers weigh buildings in older industrial areas against newer sites in the valley and on the west side. Cold chain and distribution partners are nearby, as outlined on our cold storage and refrigerated page. A beverage producer that ships in volume will care about the same corridors a logistics and distribution user does, and about whether rail can serve both inbound ingredients and outbound product.
Utilities and sanitary finishes drive most of the budget. Water supply, wastewater pretreatment, power and gas capacity can cost more than the building if the site lacks them, and the corridor matters. A parcel in an industrial park with water and sewer in the street costs less to prepare than an unserved lot where a lift station or an on-site system is needed. Finishes also cost more: stainless or coated surfaces, sealed floors, hygienic doors and special lighting.
Process changes during design also move the number. Adding a line, switching from dry to wet processing, or increasing cold storage can reshape the plan. To manage this, we price scenarios during preconstruction, identify what is fixed and what can be phased, and leave room in the site for expansion. For owners with a tight budget, a leased flex building and an industrial tenant improvement package can be a lower-cost way to start production.
Food and beverage schedules often depend on a season, a retail launch or a contract start. We work backward from the date the line has to run, including time for equipment installation, sanitation, commissioning, and the inspections and audits required before first shipments. Process equipment is often imported or custom, so lead times are long and we order slab embeds and utility rough-ins from the vendor drawings.
Weather and wind also shape the sequence. Slab pours for large processing floors need wind protection and curing in dry air, and wet-weather protection when storms roll in off the mountains. The building should be dried in before sensitive finishes begin. When a plant must keep running during an expansion, our phased construction in occupied sites approach separates construction from production and sanitation zones, and sequences tie-ins during planned downtime.
Send us your process flow, daily water use and target start date. We will compare parcels on utilities and drainage and price the building to match.
Start by finding out what the local utility accepts and what pretreatment it requires, such as screening, grease removal, pH control or equalization. If the utility lacks capacity or the site is unserved, an on-site treatment system may be needed. We build the tanks, slabs and piping the owner's engineer designs, and we price utility upgrades before the land decision is final.
Many plants use a sloped concrete slab with a urethane or epoxy topping, selected for temperature, chemicals and traffic. Coved bases and sealed joints keep water out of walls. The right finish depends on process temperature, cleaning chemicals and wheel traffic. We review options with the owner and the finish supplier before design is final.
Yes, with careful investigation. Valley sites can have shallow groundwater, flood zones and drainage paths from nearby channels and acequias. We recommend geotechnical borings, drainage studies and pad elevations above flood levels. In some areas, the lack of municipal sewer is the bigger issue, so we check utility availability first.
We keep construction dust out of finished areas with barriers, positive air and clean floors, and we close the building early. In a dry, windy climate, dust travels easily, so we wet and stabilize the site, wash trucks and protect HVAC equipment. A final construction cleaning and sanitation walkthrough precedes equipment startup.
Yes. We run coordination meetings among the owner, process engineer, refrigeration contractor and equipment vendors, share a combined schedule and verify embeds, openings and utilities before concrete and walls close. Late changes in these items are expensive, so catching them early is one of our main contributions.
Tell us about the property, the building and the schedule.
Request a Project Review