MIDWAY — Liberty County’s largest private employer, SNF Floquip, has announced plans for a $7 million expansion that will double its manufacturing facility in the Midway Industrial Park to 160,000 square feet.
Floquip manufactures water-soluble polymer feed equipment used to optimize delivery of the SNF chemical polymers produced in Riceboro.
The pending expansion will be 16 times larger than the 10,000-square-foot building in Riceboro where the company launched with about 15 employees in the early 1990s. In November 2011, the facility moved to its current 80,000 square-foot shop where it employes 130 people.
An additional 80 contractors from companies such as Coastal Industrial Company LLC, Universal Electrical Company and Daybreak Industrial provide welding, pipe fitting and fabrication at the shop.
“You’d have never imagined five years ago that going from 10,000 to 80,000 wouldn’t meet our needs,” said John Rankin, the plan’s manager of manufacturing. “We can’t hire fast enough, and we can’t build fast enough.”
He said he anticipates about 35 percent employment growth.
Floqup’s parent company, French-based $2.6 billion SNF Holding Co., is in the process of making $1 billion in global business investments.