The Cost Of This Massive Coca-Cola Distribution Facility Might Make You Pause
In September 2025, ABARTA Coca-Cola Beverages officially broke ground on a future 240,000-square-foot Coca-Cola sales and distribution center in South Lebanon Township, Pennsylvania. ABARTA is expected to invest at least $100 million in building the future plant at 12 Ritter Way on 52 acres of land in the Lebanon Valley Business Park that it acquired for about $5.96 million in February 2025.
When the future South Lebanon center is finished in the Spring of 2027, it will be ABARTA's biggest facility, where 15 million cases of Coca-Cola products will be distributed, ABARTA Coca-Cola Beverages CEO Charlie Bitzer told the Lebanon Daily News. It will also dwarf its 75,000-square-foot facility in nearby Harrisburg, where 6.7 million cases of Coca-Cola are sent out every year across most of Pennsylvania and parts of West Virginia and Ohio.
Although the Trump Administration aims to increase American manufacturing jobs through its tariffs, this won't be a manufacturing facility, Bitzer explained. Instead, it will serve as an automated warehouse equipped with advanced case-picking and pallet-building technology from Vertique, an Arden, North Carolina-based company that outfits warehouses and distribution buildings with stacker cranes, robot vehicles, and other logistic innovations. But this isn't a case of a company replacing people with tools, either. Instead, company executives said this will deepen its roots in the region.
Expanding its Coca-Cola reach
ABARTA Coca-Cola is a subsidiary of ABARTA, a family-owned company founded by businessman Rolland Adams, who picked Pepsi over Coca-Cola as the company to invest in (indirectly) a long time ago. After acquiring two Pennsylvania newspapers (The Bethlehem Globe and the Atlantic City Press), Adams bought a partial interest in Coca-Cola bottling franchises in Bethlehem and Pittsburgh in 1953. By 1963, he formed a company with his three daughters and their husbands (ABARTA being an acronym of their names) and continued to buy more Coca-Cola bottling franchises. By 2017, ABARTA controlled 90% of Coca-Cola's distribution in Pennsylvania, plus Cleveland County in Ohio and the area around Fairmont, West Virginia, after buying a dozen facilities directly from the Coca-Cola company.
Today, ABARTA claims to be the 10th largest privately-owned distributor of Coca-Cola in the United States. ABARTA employs at least 2,000 people in Pennsylvania, including 223 at the Harrisburg plant, and lists 15 Coca-Cola facilities under its ownership. As of 2021, ABARTA no longer owns any interest in newspapers, energy, or technology as the company focuses on delivering Coca-Cola products such as Sprite, Dasani, Vitamin Water, Powerade, and even Monster Energy to its clients. The high-tech South Lebanon facility will be key to enhancing its operations throughout the Keystone State and its Ohio and West Virginia territories.