A groundbreaking ceremony April 17, in Richland Township, marked the construction of the first United States manufacturing facility for an Italian-based company.
MP Filtri USA Inc., with headquarters in Milan, Italy, will be able to produce products in Upper Bucks County for American clients for the first time, once the company moves to its new facility on Richland Commerce Drive.
Upper Bucks Chamber of Commerce hosted the event with Gorski Engineering of Collegeville. Gorski is the project and site developer.
Filtri currently operates a plant with approximately 22 employees at Quaker Pointe Drive in Milford Township and will move to its new home in Richland Township later this year.
At the Milford site, the company imports, retrofits and assembles products to serve its U.S. customers, but it does not have the ability to do any manufacturing there.
That changes with the upcoming move.
The move to Richland Township and a footprint expansion will nearly double Filtri’s staff roster to approximately 40 employees and provide the space the firm needs to manufacture some of the hydraulic systems filtering products it offers to American clients.
It will be the first Filtri manufacturing facility in the United States, according to Angela Floyd, Filtri spokeswoman.
She said the target time-frame to begin manufacturing would be sometime in 2020 or 2021. “We’ll move in as soon as the new building is [ready],” Floyd said.
Jerry Gorski, president and CEO of Gorski Engineering, said Filtri is one of the companies at the Northfield Business Campus, a roughly 118-acre industrial complex located on East Pumping Station Road.
Gorski said once completed, the Northfield Business Campus could bring an estimated 200 jobs to Upper Bucks County with 160,000 square feet of buildings on roughly 50 developed acres.
“It’s always good to see a client you’ve worked with on developing a site,” Gorski said.
He said he enjoys working with a blank [development] canvas to help visualize and create new facilities and opportunities for clients.
Gorski said two additional projects are currently under construction at the site, and tenants are sought for those uses at the industrial park.
“A lot of our local employees [at Milford] are from Upper Bucks and Allentown,” so the location remains a good one, Floyd said.
She noted Upper Bucks County’s transportation infrastructure and logistics accommodations have been a consistently good match for the Italian-based company’s interests in the United States.
Planning and construction are under way for two additional buildings on the Northfield Business Campus, and tenants are sought for them.
One building is roughly 30,000 square feet and the second is roughly 50,000 square feet.
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