Central Perk (Lance Turner Editor’s Note)

A rendering of the 530,000-SF Westrock Coffee Co. distribution center planned for Conway. The 72-dock building is expected to be complete later this year. (Tempus Realty Partners/Lewis Architects Engineers)

Wake up and smell the coffee. Arkansas has a multimillion-dollar caffeine corridor under construction, stretching from Interstate 430 at Cantrell Road all the way up Interstate 40 to Conway.

In case you missed it in the run-up to the Fourth of July weekend, Scott Ford’s Westrock Coffee Co. of Little Rock is brewing a major upgrade of its Kimberly-Clark plant renovation in Conway.

On June 30, Ford announced that he had increased his $100 million investment there, first unveiled in December 2021, to $300 million, with expected employment going from 250 to 850 amid high demand for the company’s coffees, teas, extracts and other beverages.

The 524,000-SF facility was already set to be the world’s largest ready-to-drink packaging plant. The plant will also have advanced robotics, a product development lab and a U.S. Food & Drug Administration-certified pilot plant where Westrock will test new products.

Ford and his corporate team will manage the plant and its neighboring 530,000-SF distribution facility from 50,000 SF of newly leased property in Building 3 of the former Systematics office park at 4001 N. Rodney Parham Road in Little Rock.

The location provides quick access to Westrock operations in Pulaski and Faulkner counties. And for Arkansas business history nerds, it offers a delicious cup of trivia: Ford, the former CEO of Alltel Corp., shares a building with the offices of Windstream Holdings Inc., a spinoff of the wireless telephone company Ford once led.

What’s more, both Westrock and Windstream occupy space that once housed Systematics Inc., the data processing company founded by Walter Smiley that Alltel purchased in 1990. Today that company is owned by publicly traded Fidelity National Information Services Inc. of Jacksonville, Florida, which has offices elsewhere in the park.

Westrock’s investment in central Arkansas is a big win on a few levels:

1) Commercial real estate: I remember in 2018 when state and local officials tried, but failed, to keep the massive Kimberly-Clark plant open as the paper products giant restructured global operations. Putting the building back to use is an achievement. That it’s a local company doing it is even sweeter. Westrock’s investment in the Little Rock office park is also noteworthy, amid a continuing work-from-home trend.

2) Jobs: Losing the K-C plant cost Conway 350 jobs. Westrock is bringing more than double that amount back to the site, at an average annual salary of around $70,000. That’s quite a turnaround.

3) A corporate hub: Westrock, founded in 2009, hit the Nasdaq in August 2022, giving Arkansas a new publicly traded company. Central Arkansas is home to more than its share of public firms, and the addition of Westrock burnishes the region’s reputation as a hub for corporate headquarters.

Lance Turner is the editor of Arkansas Business.