Industrial, Manufacturing, Retail, Office
Apple Valley, MN
This design-build project encompassed the full lifecycle of a major commercial development from site selection to construction delivery. EFH spent several years identifying a suitable piece of land with sufficient acreage for both immediate construction and future expansion before breaking ground on an 80,000-square-foot facility built from the ground up. The building houses a large-scale chocolate manufacturing plant, commercial-grade production kitchens, industrial-capacity coolers and freezers, and a retail component for direct customer sales. All construction work was delivered through EFH's design-build process, with engineering and systems coordination resolved in parallel with construction. Following project completion, EFH Realty Advisors handled the leasing and subsequent sale of Abdallah's prior facility, providing a seamless real estate transition that complemented the construction engagement.
The central technical challenge of this project was maintaining the precise temperature control that chocolate manufacturing demands, even while installing and working around large-scale commercial kitchen and production equipment. A roughly 40-foot ventilation hood system required significant makeup air management alongside heating and cooling infrastructure capable of managing intense heat loads in warmer months. EFH's mechanical and electrical teams drew on prior manufacturing project experience to design systems that could sustain production-grade climate stability throughout the facility. Coordination was further complicated by the sheer scale of Abdallah's proprietary manufacturing equipment: because much of it was owner-supplied and installed in stages, EFH's trade teams had to continuously adapt their sequencing and access plans around machinery that was being placed and activated throughout the build. This required proactive scheduling and close collaboration with the client's operations team to keep both the construction timeline and the equipment installation on track.
The new facility effectively doubled Abdallah Candies' physical footprint, enabling a significant increase in manufacturing capacity, distribution throughput, and product variety. The expanded space allowed the company to introduce new product lines, scale existing production, and better serve its regional and national wholesale customer base. With room for future expansion built into the site plan, Abdallah is positioned to continue growing without the constraints of its previous facility. EFH's integrated approach allowed Abdallah's leadership team to focus on operations rather than real estate logistics, with every phase of the transition managed under one trusted partner.
