Two tenants expand within Hunt Midwest SubTropolis
Thomas Friestad – KC Business Journal

Two tenants — an online retailer and a pharmaceutical company — have spread their wings a collective 52,000 square feet within Hunt Midwest SubTropolis, the world’s largest underground business complex.

FarmFoods, an online retailer that sells sustainably raised meat, expanded its packaging and distribution facility nearly sixfold, from 6,200 to 36,000 square feet.

And Nostrum Laboratories, a New Jersey-based pharmaceutical company, more than tripled the size of its distribution facility, from 10,300 to 32,800 square feet.

Both companies spread their footprints into existing spaces within the business complex during the past two months, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, after initially opening last summer, Mike Bell, senior vice president of commercial development at Hunt Midwest, told the Kansas City Business Journal on Wednesday.

“SubTropolis enables pharmaceutical and e-commerce companies unparalleled opportunity and flexibility to expand their space within a short time frame,” Bell said in a Tuesday release. “We can deliver Class A industrial space to our tenants in as little as 120 days, allowing companies like Nostrum and FarmFoods the ability to capitalize on the growth of their business.”

Nostrum Laboratories sought more climate-controlled space for product safety and quality control, and a surge in online grocery shopping fueled FarmFoods’ expansion, the release says.

SubTropolis now has more than 6.5 million square feet of leasable space, with construction on 400,000 square feet of speculative Class A industrial and warehouse-logistics space finished earlier this year, and upward of 7.5 million square feet still available for development.