Lineage Logistics, owned and managed by Bay Grove Capital, has officially opened the doors of its new 216,000-square-foot cold storage and food-processing facility in Santa Maria.

The company declined to share a dollar figure for the project, which is Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified. The company has not provided a dollar figure associated with the project.

The expansion was primarily led by the needs of area growers and the lack of such high-tech cold storage space in the region, the company said. “We had local processors asking for support for their new plants, plus frozen space is limited in the region so we’re filling a demand,” Tony Caetano, Santa Maria general manager for Lineage Logistics said in an email to the Business Times. “This facility will allow us to support new companies like Titan Frozen Fruit in the Santa Maria area.”

Salinas-based Titan recently expanded into a processing facility co-located at the new Lineage facility.

Other companies Lineage will support include Sunrise Growers, Surefresh and Cascade International.

“Lineage Logistics is constantly working to build better and cleaner facilities,” Caetano said. “We are trying to build LEED distribution centers exclusively moving forward, because our customers prefer it, it makes economic sense and it’s better for the environment.”

The facility features 151,000 square feet of frozen storage and dock space, 45,000 square feet dedicated to on-site food processing, and eight blast cells with the capacity to blast freeze up to 1 million pounds per day. The Santa Maria site will also offer rail access and in-house transportation services to local and national food-supply markets. With 30,000 additional pallet positions, the facility is expected to play a major role in meeting the needs of the Santa Maria region, Lineage said. The project was designed and built by Burlington, Washington-based Fisher & Sons.

Lineage said the new facility creates 28 new full-time jobs. An additional 250 seasonal employees are already on the job, many in the Titan processing space.

“This is more than a food center,” Santa Maria Mayor Alice Patino said at a Sept. 24 grand-opening event. “This is a shining symbol of this community’s growth and prosperity and Santa Maria’s commitment to growing the economy the right way — in a way that creates good jobs and benefits the entire community while reducing our impact on our natural environment.”