Tanker truck maker opens Gretna expansion, plans to add 75 jobs

Amthor International, which bills itself as the nation’s largest and most diverse manufacturer of tanker trucks, celebrated the completion of a new 35,000-square-foot facility, a $36.5 million project, at Gretna Industrial Park Friday.

The business, which makes tanks used by the vacuum and septic, portable restroom, propane, water, refined fuel, well-drilling and construction industries along with the trucks that carry them, got its start in 1928 as Ed Amthor’s Blacksmith Shop in New York.

In the 1990s, the company’s owners, Arnold “Butch” and Alice Amthor, were planning to open a manufacturing facility. At the time, Amthor International was manufacturing a fire truck for Callands, a community in Pittsylvania County, according to Butch and Alice’s son, Brian Amthor, who is now the company’s executive vice president. Dan Sleeper, then the county administrator, suggested they look at Southern Virginia.

In 1992, the Amthors opened their new facility in Gretna. “I was only 13 years old,” Brian Amthor told Virginia Business Monday.

The facility that opened Friday sits about 300 yards from the original building and features 30 bays, according to Brian Amthor. It cost about $6.5 million, and the company invested another $30 million in equipment and inventory to support the expansion.

Currently, the company has about 105 employees. Brian Amthor expects to hire between 50 and 75 more workers in stages.

Amthor International will be looking for welders, mechanics, electricians, cleaners and workers in quality control, business development and marketing. Finding employees is company’s biggest challenge, said Amthor, who lives in New York but has a condo in Lynchburg.

“You hire five people and three quit, right?” he said. “We’re constantly trying to retain and recruit.”

Right now, the company pays 100% of employees’ health insurance premiums and gives two weeks’ vacation after a 50-day probationary period.

Amthor International is now considering moving to schedules with four 10-hour shifts a week. “We’re just trying to constantly improve,” he said.

In recent years, Brian Amthor said, the company began winding down a segment of the business in which it sent tanks to other companies that then upfit trucks.

“Over the last five to seven years, it’s been our goal to really have more and more control over how we go to market and control over the total build,” he said.

Amthor International has enough work to keep both facilities humming. “I have a tremendous backlog,”  Amthor said.

This isn’t the company’s first expansion. In 2018, Amthor International announced plans to invest $7.1 million to expand its operations in Gretna. That included a 115,000-square-foot addition to the facility.

Moving forward, the company wants to open distribution centers nationwide. “All the products will be built here in Gretna, and then we’re going to ship the completed products to our factory-owned distribution centers and key spots,” Amthor said.

Until now, most of the company’s business has came through word of mouth. With the new facility, Amthor said the plan is to “actually go after the business.”