The plants going up now are being built to a different standard
Manufacturing construction is running at historically high levels, and what gets built today has to satisfy requirements the buildings it replaces never faced.
Article
Private manufacturing construction in the United States was running at a $195.3 billion seasonally adjusted annual rate in January 2026. The US Treasury's own analysis of the same Census series puts food and beverage manufacturing construction above its 2022 level, while noting the rise is far smaller than in computers and electronics.
A straight answer about what the data says
You will read that food manufacturing is coming home. We looked at the numbers before writing that sentence, and we are not going to write it.
The Reshoring Initiative counted about 244,000 US manufacturing jobs announced in 2024 through reshoring and foreign direct investment, but 88 percent of them were in high or medium-high tech, and the leading sectors were computers and electronics, electrical equipment and transportation equipment. Food manufacturing was not among them, and the 2025 projection was about 174,000, down from the year before.
What is true is narrower and more useful: a lot of plant is being built and rebuilt, and the standard it is built to has moved.
What has actually changed is the requirement, not the headline
A food plant built today answers to sanitation regulation that speaks directly about the building. USDA's own rule is explicit: walls, floors and ceilings within establishments must be built of durable materials impervious to moisture, and cleaned and sanitized as necessary to prevent adulteration or insanitary conditions. The same section requires ventilation adequate to control odors, vapors and condensation.
Read that as a building instruction rather than a paperwork one and it changes what you specify. Impervious to moisture is a surface decision. Controlling condensation is an envelope decision. Cleaned and sanitized as necessary — every shift, with something aggressive — is a durability decision, and it is why stainless stops being a premium and starts being the answer in a caustic wash-down room.
Which is where the money is actually won or lost
The expensive mistakes we get called into are not exotic. They are an envelope specified against the wrong operating temperature, a joint detail that cannot hold a seal once the room is running, a wall surface that cannot take the cleaning regime the plant actually uses, or a floor assembly that was decided by whoever poured the slab.
None of those are visible at handover. All of them are visible in year two.
If you are building or expanding plant, the envelope decisions are cheapest while the drawings are still open. That is the conversation we are useful in.
Sources
Every figure above comes from one of these, with its publisher and date so you can check it. Our own experience — the failure modes and the selection decisions — is ours, and is not sourced to anybody else.
- Total Private Construction Spending: Manufacturing (PRMFGCONS) — US Census Bureau, via FRED, January 2026
- Unpacking the Boom in U.S. Construction of Manufacturing Facilities — US Department of the Treasury, featured analysis
- 2024 Annual Report, including 1Q2025 insights — Reshoring Initiative, June 2025
- 9 CFR 416.2 — Establishment grounds and facilities — USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, current
D.W. Ross Company — Building envelopes that have to hold a temperature, from Cleveland, since 1921. These notes come out of our own projects.
Where this applies
Got a room that is not behaving?
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