Clemens Food Group Hatfield Facility Renovation and Expansion

A construction project located in Hatfield.

A Bit About Clemens Food Group Hatfield Facility Renovation and Expansion

Renovating a food plant while it runs is harder than building a new one, and Clemens Food Group has committed $130 million to doing exactly that at its Hatfield Main facility in Montgomery County.

Gray Construction is delivering the work design-build. It’s the fourth Clemens project for the Lexington firm, which finished a 308,000-square-foot expansion on the same site in 2022.

Project Scope

The package splits two ways. A new 42,000-square-foot expansion goes up on the existing campus, and roughly 59,500 square feet of the current plant gets an interior rebuild. A Hatfield Township land development filing in March 2026 describes a 37,587-square-foot addition with associated parking, driveway and stormwater work, a figure that doesn’t line up cleanly with the 42,000 in the company’s own announcement. The difference is probably a refined scope or a separate phase.

The site is a working plant of roughly 1.2 million square feet belonging to the fifth-largest pork processor in the country. Everything in the renovation scope has to be sequenced around USDA-inspected production, which means night and weekend work, temporary partitions rated for a food-safe environment, and sanitation protocols that govern how the trades enter and leave the space. Completion is targeted for the first half of 2027.

Why It Matters

Protein processing has been one of the steadier industrial construction segments through a soft nonresidential cycle, and it rewards a specific kind of contractor. The scopes are refrigeration-heavy, the stainless and drainage details are unforgiving, and a schedule slip translates directly into lost production days for an owner who counts them in truckloads.

Gray winning a fourth job for the same client is the pattern that keeps showing up in this segment: owners consolidate around builders who already know the plant, because the learning curve on an operating food facility is expensive and gets paid for once. That’s a barrier to entry for regional GCs looking to move into the work, and it’s why the same handful of names appear on protein projects nationally.