UPS to Build $275M Salt Lake City Hub

By Keith Loria, Contributing Editor

Salt Lake City—UPS will build a $275 million, new regional operations hub in Salt Lake City, an 840,000-square-foot facility that will process 69,000 packages per hour as a complement to the existing 200,000-square-foot operations in town.

Mark Wallace

When completed in 2018, the project will be among the largest processing facilities in the company’s global package network.

“This new regional hub is one of our strategic initiatives to continue to build the long-term future of UPS,” Mark Wallace, UPS’ senior vice president of global engineering and sustainability, said in a prepared release. “Utah is the crossroads to serving the Western U.S., and the state-of-the-art automation technology being deployed will improve performance, increase capacity and create additional flexibility to handle the non-stop growth of e-commerce business in the region.”

The property will include onsite fueling to accommodate both diesel and natural gas alternative fueled vehicles. Two automated processing areas will focus on smaller-sized packages, typical of today’s e-commerce purchases.

Approximately 160 acres were assembled with convenient interstate and airport access to support UPS’ growth across the mountain west, much of it from commercial and residential e-commerce.

“UPS’ customers benefit from new efficiencies and capacity and we sustain and grow jobs in the area for a positive economic impact,” Ken Cherry, president of the UPS Desert Mountain district, said in the release.

UPS has made a number of significant capital investments over the past 24 months focused on new construction combined with modernization and expansion of top tier hubs in the U.S. to address planned growth. Next year, the company is in line to handle more B2C shipments than business-to-business traffic for the first time ever.

Since December, the company has announced plans to build facilities in Atlanta, Ga. and Columbus, Ohio, and said it would expand its existing facility in Jacksonville, Fla. Additionally, it is automating its 30 busiest U.S. hubs, in a program its calling “Tier One,” designed to yield 20 to 25 percent in productivity improvements per facility by the time all the work is done in 2020.

UPS currently employs more than 3,500 workers across Utah in package, heavy freight and contract logistics operations. The company’s footprint includes 24 operating facilities and 46 The UPS Store locations as independently owned small businesses that are part of a franchise network.