Image Credit: Axle Logistics / Facebook
The Center Square [By Jon Styf] –
Tennessee’s Department of Economic and Community Development is giving Axle Logistics a $5 million incentive for its $37.9 million expansion in Knoxville.
The company said it plans to add 651 jobs over the next five years. The company expects to build an 85,000-square-foot facility adjacent to its existing operations on North Central Street.
Axle Logistics is headquartered in Knoxville with a Chattanooga satellite location.
The incentive is set to be approved by Tennessee’s State Funding Board on Thursday.
The board is also set to approve $2.25 million for Vonore Fiber Products in Monroe County, $1 million for Florim USA in Clarksville and yet-to-be-named $1.5 million and $900,000 incentives.
The ECD, however, announced Wednesday that Custom Foods of America will spend more than $51 million to expand its manufacturing and distribution operations in Knoxville and Xxentria Technology will spend $45 million on its U.S. metal composite production facility in Mt. Pleasant.
Neither have been listed along with incentives to this point.
All of the incentives are FastTrack incentive grants, sent to companies to help offset the costs of expanding or moving into the state with the goal of increasing the number of full-time jobs and the average wages of jobs available in an area.
The TNECD recently asked for $78 million in additional budget for its FastTrack grants next fiscal year.
The Vonore project involves Genera spending nearly $350 million to expand production and distribution at its Vonore, Tennessee, Sustainable Biomaterials Campus.
The project adds 150,000 square feet to the existing facility along with new equipment, including more than 60 robotically controlled thermoforming machines, a fleet of autonomously guided vehicles and automated packaging lines.
The company says the project will involve adding 230 jobs over a five-year span.
Florim was awared $700,000 from the TNECD in 2021 for a planned $36 million expansion with a 460,000-foot warehouse that was recently completely, according to Clarksville Now.
