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When Cheney Brothers unveiled plans four years ago to develop a state-of-the-art distribution center on 35 acres adjacent to the Punta Gorda Airport in Charlotte County, more than a few logistics experts were puzzled.

Though the company would receive more than $1.5 million in state and county financial incentives to sweeten the deal, and its planned warehouse would be located next to Interstate 75, the concept hardly seemed to make sense.

Gulf Coast distributors traditionally locate either on the Interstate 4 corridor, between Tampa and Orlando, to the north, or in Fort Myers, to the south in Lee County.

In Charlotte, Cheney Bros. would effectively be in a “no man's land” between the two distribution hubs.

But with the opening of the $43 million distribution center late last year, Cheney Bros. appears to be relishing its role as a pioneer.

“With this facility, we form a perfect triangle with our other two major distribution points in Riviera Beach and Ocala,” says Warren Newell, the company's new project development officer. “And we really rely on each other.”

Cheney Bros.' warehouse also is spurring a larger discussion in some quarters about logistics in a state where population — and vehicular — growth are causing strains on existing road networks and elongating the time it takes to ship goods from place to place.

“We need to think about distance plus time now, and not just distance,” Newell says. “The roads are more crowded now, and the infrastructure in Florida is just not keeping up, for a lot of reasons. It's a constant concern.”

For food distributors like Cheney Bros. that rely on being able to deliver goods on specific schedules to restaurants such as Subway, Miller's Ale House and Hooters, resorts, hospitals and prisons, being able to predict how long it will take to ship material is critical -- and can mean the difference between keeping a customer or losing one.

From Punta Gorda, a 345,000-square-foot warehouse that has the potential to be expanded to 550,000 square feet, Cheney Bros. trucks everything from Coca-Cola to Karo syrup as far north as Tampa and south as Everglades City.

“Strategically, it's a great location for them, because from Charlotte County, they can cover the whole west coast of Florida and get to Interstate 4 pretty easily,” says Ron Struthers, a Coldwell Banker Commercial agent who specializes in the Charlotte County market.

“The populations are on the coasts, so that's where they want to be, too.”

Kostas Stoilas, an industrial real estate specialist with real estate services firm CBRE Inc., says Cheney Bros. likely used client data to determine where to locate.

“(Punta Gorda) isn't an area where I would normally expect to see a facility that large, but when you peel back the layers, it makes sense,” Stoilas says.

“I don't think it strange, especially if you consider that if a lot of their clients are in Miami, then they'd want to be further south,” he adds. “It's pioneering of them, but with the population of Florida growing, there are now a lot of great sites all along I-75 and I-95.”

To mitigate traffic tie ups, road construction, bad weather or other factors, Cheney Bros. has amped up technologically.

Its trucks contain GPS devices and can be redirected based on constant intelligence from a central monitoring source. Punta Gorda also knows whether a truck is in motion, idling too long, or if there's been a sudden decrease or increase in weight.

Inside the 36-foot-clear warehouse, workers buzz around on modern forklifts, picking out boxes from three stories up. Sections of the facility are climate controlled for specific foods, fresh and frozen.

Everything is bar coded, as well, for ease of packing. Some 35 trucks a daily supply the facility, bringing in goods in the morning for redistribution to clients each afternoon.

And while Punta Gorda is the family-owned company's newest distribution center, it isn't its largest. Cheney Bros.' Ocala center, for instance, measures 550,000 square feet. Riviera Beach, the site of the company's headquarters, has a 300,000-square-foot warehouse, by comparison.

Struthers, for one, hopes the presence of a company like Cheney Bros., with $1.5 billion in annual sales and a reputation for being at the vanguard of logistics technology, will lure other distributors to consider Charlotte County.

“I think we're going to see others come in there as a result of Cheney Bros.,” he says. “I know that was the hope of the county and private developers when they enticed them to go there.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Newell says the biggest obstacle Cheney Bros. has faced with its Punta Gorda operation has been in finding enough qualified workers.

The facility currently employs 280; it won't reach full capacity until 400 are employed there.

But even before Cheney Bros. hits that number, it is already looking beyond Charlotte County to a possible fourth distribution facility — in Homestead, near Miami.

- K.L. McQuaid