In December 2025, an affiliate of a major beverage bottler paid $29.7 million for a former warehouse at the Roanoke Centre for Industry and Technology, a deal that adds warehousing, distribution space, and a fleet shop for the bottler's trucking subsidiary alongside the roughly 500-employee bottling plant it already runs in downtown Roanoke. Packaging equipment investment at that scale isn't an outlier here: the Roanoke Regional Partnership counts nearly 50 food and beverage manufacturers across the region employing more than 1,800 people, spanning breweries, dairy and meat processors, soft-drink bottlers, and commercial bakeries. Just outside the city in Botetourt County, a craft brewery built a $48 million production facility capable of roughly 200,000 barrels a year, running a bottling and canning line at up to 600 bottles a minute, one more sign of a regional cluster that treats packaging capacity as core infrastructure.

Roanoke's bottlers, brewers, and bakers are riding a growth curve we've handled before: we helped a food producer here add automated case packing to keep pace with rising orders without adding headcount. Our Mars Series vertical form fill seal (VFFS) machine bags granular and powdered product like flour, mixes, and snack items at production speed, while case packers box bottles, cans, and bagged product into cases without slowing the line down as volume climbs. The cluster keeps growing. A $29.7 million warehouse expansion only pays off if the bottling line behind it can keep filling it, exactly the case-packing and palletizing capacity our equipment is built for. We keep Mars Series machines in stock for a Roanoke-area bottler, brewer, or food manufacturer that can't wait on its next production run. Ballast Point's brewery runs bottles and cans at up to 600 a minute on a $48 million line just outside city limits, a pace the rest of Roanoke's food and beverage cluster is scaling toward too.