Most conversations in industrial real estate start with the building – where to site it, what it costs, how fast it can be delivered. A session at CREDA’s I.CON Cold Storage this week moderated by Eric Brown, president of ALTA Refrigeration, took the opposite approach, asking what the operation itself demands before the building is considered.
Brown was joined by Colin Massa, principal program lead for industrial development and construction at Chick-fil-A Supply, Bill Moultrie, vice president for cold storage, Stream Realty Partners, and Ben Trusty, principal of design at Chick-fil-A Supply, to trace how operational priorities have shaped the company’s distribution network as it has scaled.
Resiliency Born from a Satisfaction Problem
Massa opened by explaining why Chick-fil-A Supply exists at all. Before the company was formed, third-party logistics providers served the fast-growing restaurant chain and maintaining a high level of reliability became increasingly important to keep pace supply chain reliability sat at “about 40% satisfaction rating” among operators. In response to the needs of restaurant operators’, the Cathy family took an approach of innovation: building an internal supply chain, starting with a facility in Cartersville, Georgia, in 2020. The pilot program was built out with leased space and trailers rather than a full ground-up design. As Massa put it, that first building was “a little bit more build-design than maybe design-build,” as the team was still learning what the business actually needed.
That pilot has since grown into a network of 13 facilities and 1,650 team members, now handling roughly 42% of the restaurant footprint’s daily deliveries.
Designing for Culture, Not Just Throughput
Trusty described a design choice that visitors to the Chick-fil-A Supply distribution centers notice immediately: extensive use of glass walls, borrowed directly from Chick-fil-A’s corporate support center. “Every time we give a tour of one of our distribution centers, everyone’s really, really surprised and loves the fact that it’s so open and bright,” he said. It’s a detail that could easily be value-engineered away on a typical distribution project, but for Chick-fil-A Supply it reflects something more deliberate.
Massa explained that as the company expands into new markets, preserving that same feel in an industrial setting is central to extending the culture built at the corporate office to warehouse team members across the country – regardless of whether that building sits in Georgia or a market thousands of miles away.
Stewardship Over Decades, Not Just Delivery
Perhaps the clearest thread through the conversation was the long ownership horizon behind Chick-fil-A Supply’s design decisions. Massa described the team’s role as delivering “an asset for the Cathy family, for our warehouse team members, for staff that they’re going to be able to live and operate in for 40 plus years.” The first question the team asks isn’t how much a decision saves, it’s how a change affects day-to-day operations, and then how it affects the facility 10 to 15 years down the road. “It’s not always the dollar amount,” Massa said, “but the longevity and ROI calculation.”
That long horizon also shows up in how the company treats its own design standards. Rather than locking in a fixed spec sheet after building its first few facilities, Chick-fil-A Supply’s design criteria continually evolves. “It’s more of a living document of how our standards are and how we’ve progressed through our journey,” Trusty said. Moultrie added that Chick-fil-A’s own instinct to keep innovating means the standard will likely never fully settle.
For Chick-fil-A Supply, designing facilities that carry corporate culture into the warehouse and treating every decision as one a future team member will have to live with for decades to come, guides their approach.
The post Built Around the Operation: How Chick-fil-A Supply Approaches Real Estate appeared first on Market Share.
