Gray Construction

Gray is a Lexington, Kentucky design-builder that has worked on manufacturing and food processing facilities since 1960, delivering architecture, engineering and construction under a single contract. The firm concentrates on food and beverage, automotive, distribution and advanced manufacturing, sectors where an operating plant usually has to keep running through the work. Gray is delivering the $130 million renovation and expansion of Clemens Food Group’s Hatfield, Pennsylvania pork plant, adding 42,000 square feet and rebuilding roughly 59,500 square feet of interior space inside a USDA-inspected facility. It is the fourth Clemens project for Gray, which completed a 308,000-square-foot expansion on the same campus in 2022.

Five Gray addresses cluster in downtown and east Lexington. The home office sits at 10 Quality Street, reachable at (859) 281-5000, with additional operations on Rose Street, Winchester Road and East Short Street, and a Gray AES office in Suite 150 at the Quality Street building.

James Norris Gray and Lois Howard Gray started the company in 1960 in Glasgow, Kentucky. The family moved headquarters to Lexington in 1988 and the business remains family-owned. Its stated purpose is to make a positive difference in people’s lives and build a better future, and safety is named as the company’s first core value, backed by what the firm describes as an award-winning safety program.

Design-build is the core delivery method. Around it Gray offers architecture, engineering, construction, automation, specialty equipment fabrication and real estate services, either as a complete end-to-end package or as individual disciplines. The structure runs through a set of specialized companies. Gray AES supplies architecture, engineering, robotics and automation for greenfield builds, expansions and modernizations, using either design-build or design-bid-build. Anderson Dahlen Inc., which started in the 1940s as a heating and air conditioning company, now fabricates specialty equipment and stainless steel for food and beverage, industrial and pharmaceutical clients from plants in Ramsey and Waconia, Minnesota. NexGen Contracting is the self-perform arm, staffed with trade professionals handling concrete, steel, millwright work and finishes.

Six industrial markets define the work: advanced technology, data centers, distribution and commercial, food and beverage, manufacturing, and life sciences. Featured projects include dual QTS data centers, the Qcells solar facility, a highly automated Hill’s Pet Nutrition plant, and project services at BlueOval SK Battery Park in Kentucky. A Hill’s Pet Nutrition manufacturing director publicly credited Gray as design-build lead on that facility.

The office footprint reaches fifteen US states, from Fullerton, California to Charlotte, North Carolina, plus Edmonton in Alberta, Mexico City, Graz in Austria, and Chuo City in Tokyo.