Michael Watkins, Vice-President – Marketing, Rytec High Performance Doors With annual sales of $6.7 billion, Golden State Foods (GSF) is one of the leading diversified suppliers to the Quick Service Restaurant sector, keeping more than 100 customer accounts in over 125,000 restaurants supplied and cooking on three continents. GSF provides these locations with liquid product, meat product, produce, and dairy processing and distribution, along with other services that make it an important partner in the supply chain for many major names in fast food. The company keeps these demanding customers happy by delivering on-schedule deliveries while protecting product quality throughout the handling process. To serve more than 460 McDonald’s restaurants throughout northern Illinois and Indiana, GSF recently opened a 152,670 square-foot regional headquarters and logistics center in McCook, Ill. The complex is on a 15-acre parcel conveniently located on a transportation corridor in the near west Chicago suburbs and replaces an older facility in the area. Ware Malcomb Architects, with McShane Construction overseeing the project, designed this sizable build-to-suit facility. To handle the large volume of product flowing this facility, their freezer storage room is equipped with six high-speed insulated doors and are accessed in the fresh food cooler via three self-repairing high-speed doors. More than the typical big box distribution facility, the McCook building features a stylish, contemporary design and consists of a two-story, 17,550 square-foot office component with a 135,120 square-foot warehouse/distribution space. The company maximizes this building footprint by taking the ceiling height to 40 feet and by setting up a cross-dock, flow-through handling pattern. The distribution space breaks out to 54,000 square feet of dry storage. The building’s cascade refrigeration system maintains 14,040 square feet of cooler space at 34°F and 23,400 square feet of freezer storage at 10°F to handle the bulk of the […]