Montgomery County officials are once again looking to attract new tenants to the former Beech-Nut site in Canajoharie.
There’s something missing in Canajoharie – in 2011, baby food producer Beech-Nut left its 1-million-square foot factory for a smaller facility in the Town of Florida, leaving a decaying production plant behind.
In 2018, the small Montgomery County town received a $6 million state grant from the Restore New York Communities Initiative to demolish the building.
Now, an empty 22-acre lot sits just off Thruway Exit 29.
“This left a huge hole in our village and in our county,” said Peter Vroman.
Peter Vroman is five months into his term as Montgomery County Executive after serving as Canajoharie Town Supervisor.
“Yeah, it was an anchor for everyone that lived here. Their parents worked there, their grandparents worked there. Definitely historic and definitely a huge part of this region,” said Vroman.
Vroman says the now-flattened site is “essentially shovel-ready.” Now the challenge is finding people to move in.
“Yeah, well we’ve cast a wide net to include BJ’s Wholesale, to include Cracker Barrell, to include Aldi’s, to include a convenient store type of chain that’s called Sheetz. They’re down in Pennsylvania, I don’t know if you’re familiar with them or not but they’re real colorful and they’re real fun and they do food and they do gasoline. They employ a lot of people,” said Vroman.
While he’s keeping his options open, Vroman says he’s already gotten some local stakeholder feedback.
“I was at the local nursing home about two months ago, just a ‘hello,’ new County Exec type of thing, and it was seniors and they asked, the first question was ‘what are we doing with the old Beech-Nut site?’ So, I said ‘that’s a really good question, it’s really on my mind, we’re doing a lot. We reached out to Aldi’s,’ and when I said Aldi’s they lit up and were chanting ‘Aldi’s, Aldi’s, Aldi’s,’” said Vroman.
Lou Sierra and a friend are at a window table in The Village Restaurant across the street. You can see the vacant lot just feet away. Sierra, in his 70s, has lived in Canajoharie his entire life, and he’s seen the impact of Beech-Nut’s exodus first-hand.
“I never worked in there but I knew a lot of people who did work in there and you know everybody was pretty much settled in this area and that was at one time, I believe, it had about 1,100 people working there. And this [Canajoharie] was on the border of maybe becoming some kind of a small city or something. But that never really happened. But when you’re a little kid and you see all the people—and you see all the changes going on now, we’re practically in the boonies now,” said Sierra.
E29 Labs was set to construct a 160,000-square foot cannabis production plant at the site. But those plans fell through, with the company citing permitting issues.
“They closed the factory and it was just like very noticeable. It literally turned us into a ghost town. It was hard to recover at first. Things got pretty bad; our main street was mostly empty. No one wanted to rent the spots. It was a rough time,” said Travis Button.
Travis Button is a manager at Lee’s Christmas Corner just down the road from the empty lot. The lifelong Canajoharie resident says they were lucky to demolish the deteriorating factory; now it’s just a matter of finding the right use of the space.
“The lot gives us a lot of opportunities. We’ve talked to the county a lot about using some of it, the Church Street facing part of the lot, as greenspace that would hopefully be connected to the riverfront park. It’s a perfect spot for warehouses, a business, grocery store, basically anything that would take up that much space and appreciate direct access to the thruway,” said Button.
Vroman adds his office is applying for a $2 million state grant to renovate existing warehouses to accommodate a regular farmers’ market.
