Erlen Group cuts ribbon on $57M Cold Zone facility

Just shy of 15 months after breaking ground on a cold storage facility in Partnership Industrial Center West, the Erlen Group celebrated the opening of the $57 million plant with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Wednesday.

Erlen Group subsidiary Cold Zone is the operator of the 171,000-square-foot building at 1200 N. Haseltine Road that has the capacity to house hundreds of millions of eggs for client Vital Farms Inc. (Nasdaq: VITL). A groundbreaking was held in June 2024 for the facility, which is located across Haseltine Road from the 2022-opened Greene County Sheriff's Office and Jail and south of the Springfield-Branson National Airport. 

John Griesemer, chair and CEO of the Erlen Group, said at the ceremony that the Cold Zone expansion came after he attended a Vital Farms investor event in 2023, when he learned the company had a $1 billion sales goal by 2027.

"I came back, I shared that with the team, they ran some numbers, and they're like, 'Holy cow, that's a lot of pallets of eggs,'" Griesemer said. "We weren't there yet, so we quickly did some math and came up with the idea for this facility."

Griesemer said "the egg basket," the colloquialism for the Vital Farms cold storage area in Erlen Group's Springfield Underground, had officially moved to PIC West with the opening of the new Cold Zone plant.

Vital Farms President and CEO Russell Diez-Canseco echoed the spirit of collaboration between the companies, noting Erlen Group, Cold Zone and the community have embraced the egg business "in the spirit of problem solving." Vital Farms opened its Springfield plant – dubbed Egg Central Station – in 2017, and it doubled the size of the Springfield egg washing and packing facility to 150,000 square feet by 2022, according to past reporting. Egg Central Station is nearly a mile and a half northeast of the new Cold Zone plant. 

"The Vital Farms story really has a big inflection point here in Springfield, Missouri," Diez-Canseco said.

He credited Griesemer and Erlen Group President and Chief Financial Officer Christina Angle for the Cold Zone plant.

"I would argue that we didn't have this place in mind," Diez-Canseco said. "John and Christina and their teams had this place in mind. The reality is, we're joined at the hip. Our success is your success, and your success is our success."

He added that Vital Farms is on track to hit its $1 billion sales goal earlier than expected, and that the new Cold Zone plant would assist the company in its future growth plans.

Speaking at the event, Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce President Matt Morrow said the plant is "catalytic to our community's growth as a recognized food manufacturing hub here in the Midwest." The Springfield metro area recently tied for No. 5 in the West North Central region and 25th on the overall ranking of the 387 U.S. metropolitan statistical areas in the 2025 Best Places for Food Manufacturing Report from Global Location Strategies. 

"This is a ribbon cutting that serves as a marker of where we're headed as a region," Morrow said. "It's an exciting future that's in front of us."

Angle said the plant represents an expansion of an existing, thriving food manufacturing economy in the area.

"This local economy has a really strong presence in food manufacturing. This facility really is just an expansion of that, another step along the way to growing that economy," she said. "More importantly, this project is an investment in people. It's creating a lot of opportunities. Our Cold Zone team has grown from 12 people to over 100 in the last six years."

Edwardsville, Illinois-based Contegra Construction Co. served as the project’s general contractor, with UMB Bank providing financing, officials said at the event.

Cold tour
Following the ribbon-cutting ceremony that took place outside the plant on what was a muggy day in September, the temperature shifted dramatically during a tour of the facility led by Cold Zone staffers.

The facility was customized with refrigeration equipment that keeps the plant at 36 degrees Fahrenheit, said Bob Newell, vice president of development for Erlen Group.

Visitors wore coats provided by Cold Zone on the tour, and the plant was bustling with activity as workers delivered eggs to and from its 30 docks.

Shelves were stacked to the ceiling with product for Vital Farms, and visitors had the opportunity to visit the nest-run side of the facility that holds eggs directly from farms, with additional pallets on the finished good side.

Newell said when accounting for both the nest-run and finished good portions of the building, the facility can hold 22,000 pallets of eggs at capacity. That would amount to nearly 238 million individual eggs at capacity, with over 194 million of those on the nest-run side. Newell noted Cold Zone also handles butter for Vital Farms on the finished good side of the facility.

Future expansion
The new Cold Zone plant is designed for additional growth, should the need arise, officials say.

Newell said on the current site, the facility could grow to 400,000 square feet. He noted that the overall parcel has two additional lots that could eventually bring total square footage to 800,000 across three buildings.

"Expansions would be based on demand/growth of current product or development/expansion with another client," he said via email, noting the current building is dedicated entirely to Vital Farms.