Burch Bottle (2020)
Burch Bottle and Packaging is moving to a 75,000 square foot warehouse in Queensbury, out of its 50,000 square foot location in Waterford, N.Y., north of Troy. They also have a facility in Glens Falls.
“We are moving our business up to Queensbury,” said Michael Alford, the CFO of the company. He said the lease is up on the property in Waterford, and when his company went looking, they found Queensbury and have bought the former Web Graphics building at 428 Corinth Road west of the Northway's Exit 18. Web Graphics closed in September.
Burch sells and ships plastic, metal and glass bottles, bottle caps and other packaging and containers to a variety of companies. "Our customers come from around the world and include industries such as food & beverage, pharmaceutical / health and wellness / personal care and chemical / industrial," their website says.
He said clients often come to his sales people with a design they have seen in a store and ask if Burch can produce it: “Do you sell this bottle?” they’ll ask.
The company has their own molds and designs for bottles, but they contract with fabricators to make the bottles themselves.
“We’re strictly a distributor,” he said.
The Queensbury Town Planning Board seemed most concerned with noise at last night’s meeting where Alford ran through the details.
Alford said the hours of operation for the office are normal business hours. Late nights may occur in the warehouse but inside the building only. Truck traffic will be roughly the same as it had been with Web Graphics, with FedEx and UPS coming between the hours of 6 a.m. and 7 p.m. Even their forklifts have quieter, electric motors, he said.
Street traffic might even be lower as Web Graphics had about three times the 35 employees planned for the warehouse.
“Everyone here has been really nice,” Alford told the Planning Board last night. His company is asking permission to change the building’s use from the printing operation it was into the warehouse and distribution center.
He told the board his company is looking to become a part of the community. “We’ve used all local contractors.”
For now, they will run the two sites, in Queensbury and Glens Falls. Alford said, they have two years left on the lease in Glens Falls and might consider changes at that point. The property is a 12 acre lot.