South Florida produce distributor leases cold-storage facility in Lakeland
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Mar 17, 2023

A division of South Florida Produce has signed a lease for a temperature-controlled warehouse in Lakeland.

California-based Provender Partners, which bought the warehouse in October 2022, said it has signed a deal with Farm Cut LLC, a division of South Florida Produce. Farm Cut has leased the entirety of the 42,423-square-foot refrigerated warehouse with rail service at 5300 Great Oak Drive.

John Dunphy and Chuck Rosien of JLL represented Provender and Farm Cut in the lease transaction.

The 1983-built warehouse has 12 dock-high doors, 6,000 square feet of office height and a 30-foot clear height. Clear height refers to how high inventory can be stacked within a warehouse; dock-high doors are doors that are even with typical tractor-trailer heights for loading and unloading.

Provender paid $3.5 million for the property, property records show, and then completed a renovation that included a refrigeration refit, roof repairs, and interior and exterior upgrades. The warehouse sits on 4.14 acres.

The Lakeland warehouse marked Provender's entrance into the Florida market.

In a release, the firm touted Central Florida's prime logistics position, pointing out that nearly 5 million people live within a 50-mile radius of the 132-mile Interstate 4 corridor. The I-4 corridor also has easy access to international airports in Tampa and Orlando and Port Tampa Bay.

“Central Florida is one of the fastest growing regions in the United States, but the food supply chain has not kept up with the state’s in-migration,” Provender CEO Neil Johnson said in a statement. “Food service companies, grocers, farmers and logistics companies are finding it difficult to find high quality, strategically located facilities to get their fresh products to market. The Lakeland facility is the first step in our plan to build scale in Florida, as we have in the rest of the country through future development and acquisition.”