Foth started in Green Bay in 1938, when electrical engineer Herbert Foth opened a four-person shop serving northeast Wisconsin towns. It’s now an employee-owned engineering and environmental firm with more than 750 members in 33 offices, organized into infrastructure, environment and production groups. Foth Infrastructure & Environment is one of the designers on the new Iowa 9/WIS 82 Mississippi River bridge at Lansing, Iowa. Working with Parsons, it carried the design into Iowa DOT’s first full-scale digital delivery, modeling roughly 5,450 tons of steel and 180,000 bolts to LOD 400. Bentley credits that model with about $3.2 million in savings. Foth’s other featured work runs from a shiplift dry-dock complex in Jacksonville to a design-build paper products plant in Tijuana.
Foth is organised into three business units rather than by discipline: Environment Solutions, Infrastructure Solutions and Production Solutions. Each has its own senior vice president with a published direct line, which for a client means the first call goes to the person accountable for that line of work rather than to a general enquiries desk.
The employment model is the other structural fact. Foth calls its employees members and says they hold a stake in the company’s growth and in clients’ success. That ownership structure is unusual at this scale and tends to show up in staff continuity on long projects.
The market list is broader than a civil engineering firm’s usually is. Alongside transportation and water, wastewater and stormwater, Foth works in mining, solid waste, coastal and waterfront engineering and dredging, aviation, geospatial and geophysical, remediation, distribution and logistics, engineering for product manufacturing, engineering-led design-build, manufacturing reshoring and strategic consulting and planning. Serial 1 Automation is a named service line in its own right — custom automation investment, with the firm publishing guidance on de-risking it.
Safety is stated as a position rather than a policy: no job is so important and no work so urgent that the work cannot be performed safely. Health, safety and quality are described as the constants through nearly nine decades of changing methods.
The featured project set shows the range. A shiplift dry-docking complex in Jacksonville, Florida. A design-build paper products facility in Tijuana, Mexico. The Mississippi River Black Hawk Bridge at Lansing, Iowa. Published insights cover relocating an aircraft hangar to benefit both budget and environment, augmented reality on a greenfield project, managing complex waterfront challenges and navigating airport funding.
Corporate contact runs through 2121 Innovation Court, De Pere, Wisconsin, on (920) 497-2500. The site also carries a plan distribution request route for bidders and a member gateway, and Foth publishes a sustainability section separate from its project work.
