Page 35 - BusinessWest November 14, 2022
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  This aerial photo is of a large Dennis Group project under construction in Ohio.
Architecture & Engineering
 Food for Thought
Dennis Group Stays True to Its Process
BAy Joseph Bednar
t any given time, the Dennis
Group is working on 400 to 500 projects around the world. But you wouldn’t know it by looking around
New England.
Sure, it’s worked with Agri-Mark in West
Springfield, Pepperidge Farm in Bloom- field, Conn., and a host of other companies locally over the years, but food-production plants — and that’s exclusively what this design-build engineering firm works on — tend to be bunched in certain pockets of the country, and for good reason, said Mike Damiano, head of the company’s process engineering group.
For example, “Pennsylvania supplies the Northeast. That’s a big distribution corri- dor. All the major players like to be within a stone’s throw of each other,” he noted, add- ing that other clusters are located in Ohio (serving the Midwest), Georgia (the South- east), Texas (the South), and California (the West Coast). “We have a lot of work local to
our Utah office, which seems abnormal, but it’s a growing area. A lot of it is about logis- tics, and where they can get to as many plac- es in the U.S. as economically as possible.”
In addition, food-production companies find labor, taxes, and utilities less expensive outside New England, said Chris Siart, head of the firm’s civil, structural, and architec- tural group.
“We basically design and build food and beverage facilities. We started off doing food and beverage, and we’re still doing food and beverage, for a wide range of products and clients,” he told BusinessWest. “We work with small startup companies all the way up to top-100 companies — Nestlé, Kraft, Pills- bury, and all those other big guys.”
Damiano said the Dennis Group per- forms full-service engineering for the facil- ity side of the production systems. That involves detailed design work, procurement of equipment and workforce, and manage- ment of the construction of the plant. “We don’t self-perform any construction activi- ties, so we’re design-build in the sense that we do construction management.”
Up from the Attic
The Dennis Group has witnessed explo- sive growth since it was launched by found- er — and still president — Tom Dennis in his attic in 1987. It now boasts about 200 employees in its headquarters in the Fuller Block building in downtown Springfield, and another 400 in seven satellite offices: in Cali- fornia, Georgia, Michigan, Utah, Brazil, and two in Canada.
Some of this success can be traced to timing — specifically, an explosion in the popularity of convenience-based foods and the recession-proof (and, as it turns out, pandemic-proof) nature of the food industry.
Each project begins with a concept, Siart said — a new product a company wants to develop or an existing product for which it wants to ramp up production. After a defini- tion study, which is a report defining project scope, scale, cost, and schedule, the study
is handed off to the food manufacturer for approval, with projects ranging anywhere
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