Blue Ridge Beverage to move Lynchburg ops to Campbell

Salem-based wholesale beer, wine and nonalcoholic distributorship Blue Ridge Beverage plans to invest about $10 million to move its Lynchburg operations and 94 jobs to Seneca Commerce Park in Rustburg.

The Campbell County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted Tuesday to sell about 14.6 acres in the largely county-owned industrial park to Barley Leasing, an affiliate of Blue Ridge Beverage, for $584,320. The vote included approval for the county to begin work on extending sewer and water on Ewing Drive to serve the park’s tenants. The total cost for that project is expected to be $1.2 million.

Blue Ridge Beverage plans to build an 80,000-square-foot building at Seneca Commerce Park, with an estimated price tag of about $10 million, Jacqueline Archer, the company’s president and CEO, told the board last week.

The facility will include 63,600 square feet of temperature-controlled space, a 6,400-square-foot refrigerated cooler room for draft and nonpasteurized beer and 10,000 square feet of office space. The building will be about 40 feet high and will feature six loading docks.

The plan is to have  room left over for a possible 40,000-square-foot expansion. “We’re optimistic about growing,” Archer told the board.

Blue Ridge Beverage estimates the land sale will be complete by the end of September. Balzer & Associates, a Roanoke-based architecture, engineering and surveying firm, is expected to be the company’s pick to engineer the site plan. Archer expects the process to select a general contractor will begin in November, with construction completed by December 2026.

“Our folks are plumb out of space in Lynchburg,” she said.

The Lynchburg facility, located at Forest Brook Road, currently hosts 80 sales, delivery, warehouse and administrative staffers, and 14 managers. It receives about five to seven deliveries a day and has about 20 outbound delivery routes a day.

Archer told the board that Blue Ridge Beverage makes about $275 million in annual revenue, about $50 million of that is made in its Lynchburg division, which includes 14 counties and two cities.

With more than 550 employees, Blue Ridge Beverage also has facilities in Abingdon and Waynesboro. Founded in 1938, the company has been operated by the Archer family since 1959.

In April, U.S. Rep. John McGuire, R-Goochland, and other officials attended a groundbreaking for an 100,000-square-foot industrial building that will be built at Seneca Commerce Park. An $11 million project, the building is the largest initiative undertaken by Campbell County’s Economic Development Department in over a decade.