General Mills’ Indiana Facility Obtains LEED Gold Status

The U.S. Green Building Council awarded General Mills new customer service facility in Fort Wayne, Ind., with LEED Gold Certification.

The facility, which opened Sept. 5, is the largest warehouse and distribution center project in North America to achieve LEED Gold certification and the third largest in the world. General Mills' customer service facility in Social Circle, Ga., which opened in 2010, is the second largest in the U.S. and the fourth largest in the world.

“We take great pride in the incredible number of environmentally sustainable design elements and construction practices that have gone into this building,” said Mike Nordstrom, vice president of global workplace solutions for the Minneapolis-based General Mills. “We built this facility with LEED Gold certification as our goal. We are pleased to add the Fort Wayne customer service facility to our growing number of LEED-certified buildings.”

In January 2012, an expansion at its Albuquerque production facility was awarded LEED Gold, the company’s first production facility to achieve LEED certification. In October 2011, the Swiss Innovation Center for the company’s global cereal partnership with Nestlé became the first industrial building in Switzerland to receive LEED Platinum certification. In 2010, the General Mills customer service facility in Social Circle, Ga., was awarded LEED Gold, and its customer service center in Minneapolis became the company’s first facility to receive LEED certification for an existing structure.

The Fort Wayne building uses several energy efficiency technologies and environmentally friendly design elements, including: a white roof and 100 percent concrete paving that reflects sunlight to heating and cooling costs; low-flow plumbing fixtures that reduce water use by 33 percent; retention ponds that hold storm water for landscaping irrigation; energy-efficient light fixtures, occupant sensors, high-efficient HVAC systems, roof mounted up-blast exhaust fans and wall louvers that make the facility 45 percent more energy efficient than the baseline model for industrial buildings. Also, the project obtained LEED Gold certification for its environmentally-conscious construction and operations. More than 596 tons of construction waste was diverted from landfills by sorting the materials and sending them to the appropriate recycling centers for reuse on other products.

The building was constructed by New York-based Rockefeller Group Development Corp., which completed the project last month.