100 new jobs coming to St. Tammany as $46M cold storage facility construction starts

Construction is set to begin on a massive, $46 million cold storage facility in Pearl River that promises 100 new jobs.

Elected leaders and St. Tammany Parish economic development officials are expected to gather at the groundbreaking Tuesday morning for the new Agile Cold Storage building on 10 acres near a nest of other large distribution facilities just off Interstate 59.

Based in Gainesville, Georgia, Agile blast-freezes and packs food for shipping. The Pearl River facility will be busy: The company expects to send about 100 containers of food shipments from the new facility to the Port of New Orleans for export every week, officials said when announcing the project this spring.

Construction could take up to a year. 

The ground-breaking is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. at the site on Pearl Parkway.

When the Agile project was announced in March, economic development leaders heralded it as perfectly fitting their quest to attract more distribution and logistics companies to St. Tammany. Agile’s facility will be located near the Associated Wholesale Grocers distribution facility and Rooms To Go Outlet.

The 100 new jobs are expected to have salaries of around $53,000, according to St. Tammany Corporation, the parish’s economic development agency. The state’s economic development agency also estimates the facility will create up to another 100 indirect jobs.

A 2022 St. Tammany Corp. report showed the parish had more than 8,000 jobs in the transportation, distribution and logistics sector, with a growth rate of 16% from 2017 to 2022. The agency, meanwhile, has aggressively marketed the parish, including numerous spots along Interstate 12 and 59, as a landing spot for logistics and distribution facilities. The agency also signed a working agreement in 2021 with the Port of New Orleans to push its efforts.   

Louisiana Economic Development offered an incentives package that includes a $1.5 million performance-based grant that will reimburse the company for site improvement expenditures, contingent on the company hitting certain investment and payroll targets. St. Tammany Parish also offered an incentive that cuts about two-thirds of the company’s parish property taxes for 10 years, with the company committing to use that money on construction and other costs.

The company is expected to have an annual payroll of around $5.4 million in St. Tammany, parish officials have said.