By Katherine Feser – Houston Chronicle
Published 11:59 am CDT, Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Accredo Packaging will expand its Sugar Land campus at 12682 Cardinal Meadow Drive by more than 200,000 square feet of warehouse and manufacturing space. KDW, a Houston-based design/build firm, is handling the project.
Accredo Packaging, a supplier of plastic film for the prepackaged food and consumer products markets, will expand its Sugar Land headquarters by nearly 60 percent. The expansion will bring 175 new jobs to the campus by next year.
The company, which opened the 32-acre campus at 12682 Cardinal Meadow Drive in 2009, has hired Houston-based design/build firm KDW to build more than 200,000 square feet of warehouse and manufacturing space for the latest expansion.
When complete in 2019, the facility will total nearly 550,000 square feet. A 175,000-square-foot expansion was completed 5 years ago.
“With the quality of the local work force in the area and proximity to major plastic resin suppliers, it made sense to expand our existing facility rather than invest in another part of the country,” Accredo executive vice president Rex Varn said in an announcement.
The expansion will enable the company to boost annual production of flexible film from 1.5 billion feet to 2 billion feet. Its products are used in snack foods, confectionery items, frozen foods and pet treats, paper towels and shrink wrap in bottled-water packaging.
Accredo will be positioned to meet a growing demand for flexible packaging, which extends the shelf life of products and costs less than rigid packaging such as glass bottles and cans, Varn said.
With the expansion, Accredo North America will employ about 525 workers.
“This expansion project is an example of strong development activity the city of Sugar Land is experiencing in all sectors, including industrial, commercial, and residential,” Mayor Joe Zimmerman said in the statement.
“We’ve achieved a sustainable, strong economy through an aggressive, focused economic development program that creates opportunities for new business investment and jobs,” Zimmerman said.
Accredo Packaging is part of the API group of companies, a family-owned and operated enterprise established in 1986.