Image courtesy of Table Talk Pies and Tippman Innovation

One of the largest industrial businesses in Worcester’s growing Canal District has officially opened a just-completed cold storage facility in a nearby neighborhood.

Table Talk Pies’ 74-year-old factory in the Canal District sits next to the site of the future Worcester Red Sox stadium. As the neighborhood is transformed into the city’s next entertainment district, speculation has swirled that the city may force the company to move its operations. The company has already been forced to relocate some staff after another facility was taken by eminent domain as part of the ballpark project.

The company does not appear to be leaving Worcester any time soon, however, opening a new cold storage building on Armory Street adjacent to another of its factories in South Worcester, a 50,000-square-foot facility on Southgate Street. The new building gives Table Talk dedicated cold storage space for a large portion of its finished goods, enabling the company to streamline their distribution process. The new facility hasroughly 30,000 square feet of cold storage space, consisting of slightly over 3,100 pallet positions, and six shipping and receiving docks.

“When my grandfather and his partner were making pies at night and delivering them by horse-drawn carriage in the morning, I do not think they ever could have imagined this,” Table Talk President Harry Kokkinis said in a statement. “Having this dedicated capacity is an important milestone for our company’s future that would not be possible without our partners – Chacharone Properties, Tippman Innovation, H&M Bay and of course the city of Worcester – particularly Councilor Saria Rivera, Mayor Joseph Petty, City Manager Ed Augustus, and Peter Dunn of the Business and Community Development Division.”

The brand-new building was constructed by the developer of the project, Chacharone Properties, with Fort Wayne, Indiana-based cold storage builder Tippman Innovation as the general contractor. A key aspect of this project is that it is designed to maximize energy efficiency using new, mobile-enabled monitoring technology. The freezer will be managed by H&M Bay, a national leader in LTL transportation logistics and cold storage.

Update 9:52 a.m. Sept. 16, 2019: This story has been updated to correct the name of the facility’s developer, Chacharone Properties.