More room for Fun (Beverage)

Firm nearing move to expansive new facility

Fun Beverage Inc. is expected to finish moving into Old School Station by the end of April - giving the industrial park its first tenant in a permanent building.

The 26-year-old company hopes to begin moving on the weekend of March 17.

The move will signal that Old School Station has its utilities and key pieces of infrastructure in place.

That means that the 55-acre park's owner - Montana Venture Partners, owned by Paul Wachholz and Andy Miller - can begin seriously marketing itself to prospective tenants this month because it now has a solid site to offer businesses.

Fun Beverage is a wholesale beverage distributor located on U.S. 2 just west of Kalispell city limits. Wachholz also is Fun Beverage's board chairman.

It takes in beer, wine and soft drinks from roughly 200 suppliers and sells them to roughly 400 licensed customers. Last year, it distributed about 130,000 cases of wine, 950,000 cases of beer and 110,000 cases of soft drinks across about 11,000 square miles of Northwest Montana.

That's roughly 200,000 more total cases than in 2004.

Consequently, Fun Beverage's 38,000-square-foot building on three acres is very cramped with no room to expand. In fact, the company is leasing an extra 15,000 square feet in an old potato barn north of Kalispell to hold the soft drinks.

"We're busting at the seams," Fun Beverage president Brian Clark said.

So the company's 80 employees are moving into a 105,000-square-foot building on 10 acres at Old School Station with the site designed to be able to build another 30,000 feet if needed. The move is not expected to increase Fun Beverage's work force.

"We're not building it for today, we're building it for tomorrow," Clark said.

Storage and maneuvering space is a key need for Fun Beverage.

The company's warehouse holds about 3,500 different brands of alcoholic and soft drinks - up from about 800 brands 20 years ago.

Each of Fun Beverage's customers - restaurants and stores - have specific needs and orders to be constantly filled, altered and then filled again.

At the same time, trucks from Fun Beverage's suppliers are constantly showing up to provide the company with the cache of drinks that it then distributes.

So trucks are always coming and going at the current site's two loading docks - frequently resulting in traffic backed up in its parking lot.

On the inside, workers - equipped with "pallet jacks" (moving platforms that employees ride or walk beside) - scurry up and down somewhat narrow rows between the shelves to collect and pack a cache of drinks tailored exclusively to specific customers. Consequently, traffic jams also routinely occur inside the warehouse as well.

The narrow aisle spaces mean shelves have to reach to the ceiling to accommodate 3,500 brands of drinks in sufficient quantities - which increases the time to retrieve the drinks, as well as raising the likelihood of bottles getting broken.

The new $10 million building has drastically wider aisles and lower top shelves, which translate to quick and easy maneuvering within the warehouse as orders are filled.

On the outside, the new building has three receiving docks for trucks on one side and 10 shipping docks for trucks on the other to eliminate traffic jams.

Fun Beverage is trying to sell its current site to a manufacturing company, which Wachholz and Clark declined to name until the sale is complete.

The new Fun Beverage building is the anchor of the Old School Station complex - which was annexed into Kalispell in 2005, but is an island two miles south of the main city limits. The site has 17 lots.

However, Montana Venture Partners cannot seriously market the site to prospective tenants until enough utilities and land infrastructure are in place to prove the company has something solid to offer, Wachholz and Miller said.

The site is connected to Kalispell's water system. Miller and Wachholz hope Old School Station will be connected to the city sewage system by mid-March, which is when Wachholz and Miller plan to start marketing the site.

Montana Venture Partners is about six months behind schedule on getting the utilities in place, they said.

The water lines go right past the KGEZ radio station on U.S. 93. But there was not enough room to build an accompanying sewer line along the same route without buying an easement from KGEZ owner John Stokes. No such deal could be worked out.

Consequently, Montana Venture Partners had to build a sewer line under both Ashley Creek and U.S. 93 to connect Old School Station with the city sewer system. That rerouting also involved adding a sewer lift station.

Montana Venture Partners plans to build sidewalks and a jogging path, as well as tackling signs and landscaping as soon as the weather permits.

The venture has sold two lots so far to a company that intends to find its own tenants and then design and construct buildings.

The park has one tenant already, an Internet radio venture called Osprey Media, which is in a temporary facility on the site.

Osprey is expected to move into the park's proposed 58,000-square-foot "entertainment center," which would be an administrative hub with six spoke-like wings extending from it.

Miller and Wachholz hope the entertainment center will hold a 120-seat theater, a digital animation studio, video and Internet game design facilities, plus television, film and radio production facilities.

They want to tap into the Flathead Valley's part-time community of television, movie, animation and video game artists to create a permanent colony at Old School Station. They believe that it will take about two years before construction will begin on that center.

Wachholz and Miller hope to fill up Old School Station within eight years.

Reporter John Stang may be reached at 758-4429 or by e-mail at jstang@dailyinterlake.com