Amond World brings cold storage to Madera
Wendy Alexander/The Madera Tribune
Local dignitaries and officials joined Robert Sullivan and Steve Sagouspe, who are managing partners of Amond World LLC., and staff from Span Construction & Engineering, Inc., on Tuesday for a ground breaking ceremony for the new premium refrigerated cold storage facility on North Golden State Boulevard.
Amond World LLC, in conjunction with Origo Investments broke ground on a 250,000 square foot building to be used as cold storage in the Madera Airport Industrial Park.
Amond World held a groundbreaking Tuesday for their newest venture, which is only the first phase on a two-phase building.
“They bought 30 acres and are breaking ground on the first 15 acres,” said Bobby Kahn, Executive Director of the Madera County Economic Development Commission. “The second 15 acres, they will develop in Phase 2. They are looking for other properties up and down the San Joaquin Valley.”
Amond World managing partners are Robert Sullivan and Steve Sagouspe and Kahn has been working with Sullivan to bring a project to Madera County for quite a while.
“I met Bob Sullivan many years ago when I was doing marketing missions in San Francisco,” Kahn said. “As we talked, he said he had a Madera connection. As time moved forward, I had this piece of property I was helping Chowchilla with so I was reaching out to different people I knew and he was one of them. He expressed interest in that property and put it into escrow. But, they had difficulty getting financing at that time. The deal in Chowchilla fell apart.
“They kept pursuing this project. Bob has moved to Madera full-time and teamed up with Steve Sagouspe with Sagouspe Real Estate. The two of them have been working on this project for about six years. They got their financing put together and bought this 30 acres in Madera.”
Kahn has been helping Sagouspe and Sullivan throughout the process.
“I’ve been helping and coaching them about the land and infrastructure, everything from A-Z. We’ve helped them throughout the process,” he said.
Amond World’s cold storage facility will be one of the few public facilities in the county and will be very sought after, according to Kahn.
“Cold storage is in high demand,” he said. “They should have a winner of a project, especially focusing on the almond industry. With the overseas exports shut down, the almond market depends on the Asian and Indian market to export their crop. When they are shut down, it puts a strain on the almonds. They keep coming off the trees every year. It’s put a lot of pressure off being able to sell and get all of the almond crop into the market place. There’s been carry over, making it more valuable for cold storage. Almonds is a commodity that you can store if it is kept in the right temperature. You can keep the integrity of the nut for 18 months to two years.”
Kahn said there are cold storage facilities in the county, but they are mainly privately-owned.
“Amond World will have it open to a variety companies,” Kahn said. “Anybody that handles a lot of nuts will take square footage. Many different users will take advantage of this. I think they will hit full capacity in that building pretty quickly.”
In addition, Kahn is happy where Amond World will be because that piece of land was going to be a tough sell to find a buyer for.
“The 30 acres they bought is, what I thought, the more challenging of the lots to develop because of where infrastructure is and roads are,” he said. “They are going to have to develop site improvements. It’s a big plus out there. It will keep adding to the marketplace and add square footage to our industrial market. It’s always a positive thing to add a big building like that.”
Span Construction is the general contractor for the project and is expected to be completed by spring of 2023. Then, the construction of Phase Two will begin.
