Walmart | Confidential Big Box Retailer High Capacity Perishable Distribution Center & Support Facilities

Project Name

High Capacity Perishable Distribution Center & Support Facilities

Size (sq ft)

1,273,913

HEI Project Profile - Long

With this new perishable distribution center campus, Henderson Engineers has set a new standard in logistics, efficiency, and scale, providing designs for the largest warehouse of its kind in the Owner’s fleet. The facility includes cutting-edge automated systems like an automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) that fills the 80-foot-high structure, advanced tray washing, and comprehensive redundancy in its infrastructure. The campus spans almost 250 acres with multiple components, from the 1,221,646 SF high-capacity perishable distribution center (HCPDC) to a 40,315 SF truck maintenance garage (TMG) and a 7,728 SF dedicated pallet processing building (PPB). The entire campus is designed to handle 1,200 to 1,500 delivery trailers daily and includes 350 refrigerated truck receptacles, 180 dock doors, EV charging for yard hostlers, and a 50 MW electric yard with fully redundant power systems. Other facilities on the campus include a 2,248 SF fire pump house and a 2,268 SF maintenance garage building. This campus will soon be a major food hub designed to receive, process, and store fresh and frozen goods for delivery to regional grocery stores, and a project this massive always comes with unique challenges. Starting out as a design-bid-build approach, the team quickly had to adapt to more of a design-assist/design-build mentality to aid in the procurement of long lead equipment, to speed up automation mobilization, and allow early access to facility production. This was all done while coordinating with the utilities’ construction schedule and ability to serve the site with a new substation. Despite this and other challenges, like a mid-design utility power change from 12kV to 34kV, we delivered innovative solutions, including a $15M cost saving electrical distribution redesign, a whole-site backup generator farm, and early procurement strategies. The project is currently on schedule to achieve the client’s operational goals and establishing a benchmark for future distribution facilities.

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