Flanagan invests in Durham Region

From left: Whitby Regional Councillor Derrick Gleed, Whitby Mayor Don Mitchell, Flanagan Foodservice president Dan Flanagan, Flanagan Foodservice chief operating officer Paul Keery and Marko Dzeletovich, president of Coldbox Builders.

WHITBY, Ont. — The opening of a distribution centre in Durham Region, a $20 million project, marks Flanagan Foodservice’s largest single investment in its 39-year history. 

The company, which purchased an 80,000-square-foot facility at 295 South Blair Street in Whitby, Ont. in January, is adding an additional 100,000 square feet of refrigerated space to the new distribution centre, slated to open next spring.

“This facility, once complete, will be an ideal location to service parts of GTA and east Ontario,” chief operating officer Paul Keery said at a groundbreaking ceremony on Oct. 25.

Currently, Flanagan’s distribution is organized in three locations across Ontario: Kitchener, Owen Sound and Sudbury. When the Whitby centre is operational, the warehouse and administrative portions of the Owen Sound location will move to Kitchener and Whitby.

“The majority of our Owen Sound workforce such as sales, and our drivers will be unaffected,” Keery said in an email.

Joe Flanagan started the company in 1977 as a discount grocery operation in Waterloo. Now, the company — owned by his sons Dan, Rick, Murray and Jeff — distributes more than 12 million cases of products to more than 6,000 foodservice customers in Ontario and Quebec.

Flanagan Foodservice underwent a strategic planning session five years ago. During this process, it became clear that the company’s strategy would be to “own Ontario,” explained president Dan Flanagan.

This meant the company would focus its marketing and growth on its home province, a region representing more than 40 per cent of the Canadian market, Flanagan said.

“It also focused our attention on the fact that we had plenty of room to grow in large urban centres, like the GTA,” he said. “It meant we needed to build a stronger physical presence in the province to support our growing company.”

The leadership team at Flanagan has been working on the Whitby expansion project for three years.
“No matter how we sliced and diced the data, it kept pointing to the same solution: a distribution centre in Whitby,” said Flanagan.