A French syrup maker just placed one of the year’s bigger bets on Florida’s industrial land. Monin, the flavoring and beverage-syrup company founded in Bourges, France, in 1912, announced Aug. 3 that it will build a manufacturing and distribution facility in Zephyrhills, a Pasco County city northeast of Tampa, in a project the company and local officials value at more than $111 million.
The deal is notable less for its size, which is modest next to Florida’s billion-dollar aerospace and defense wins, than for what it signals: a foreign, family-owned manufacturer choosing to consolidate both production and distribution under one Florida roof rather than simply leasing warehouse space to serve the U.S. market. Monin plans to purchase roughly 70 acres inside the 335-acre Zephyrhills Airport Industrial Park, a site Duke Energy and the Pasco Economic Development Council had spent two rounds of site-evaluation work preparing and marketing to exactly this kind of buyer.
“This will be our largest production and warehouse distribution facility anywhere,” Monin CEO Bill Lombardo told Tampa Bay’s WFTS during the county commission’s approval hearing, a comment that puts the Zephyrhills project ahead of the company’s existing plants across four continents. Company officials said Monin evaluated 10 candidate sites across four states before settling on Pasco County, citing labor availability, site readiness and room to expand production over the next decade or two…