Ice business slides into Moses Lake

Location will eventually produce 400 to 600 tons per day

MOSES LAKE - It might just be several degrees colder in Moses Lake this summer.

Seattle-based company Allied Ice recently moved into a facility at 1329 E. Wheeler Road.

"Safeway built this plant as a milk processing plant for their milk," said owner John Grosso. "They eventually sold it to Darigold."

The latter company used the facility to manufacture milk for a number of years as well, Grosso said, until it closed about seven years ago. Allied Ice purchased the building April 1.

Allied Ice is a manufacturing facility and distribution company with five manufacturing plants in Seattle, Mukilteo, Lakeland, Bremerton and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in addition to its new location in Moses Lake.

"We manufacture approximately 600 tons of ice per day, which is the equivalent of 100,000 of those party bags you find in the store, amongst all of our plants," Grosso said.

For the next two years, the Moses Lake location serves as a distribution center, but the company plans to put in a manufacturing facility to produce between 400 and 600 tons per day.

"The reason for that is we will be able to, out of this facility then, supplement our Seattle area, our Spokane area, and also we can take care of Wenatchee, Tri-Cities and Yakima out of it," Grosso said.

The building is 27,000 square feet, but Grosso only plans to use about 8,000 initially.

"We are either going to build the external of this building and build the plant, or we will actually raise the roof on this one and use this building," he said.

The space includes a freezer which will hold about 500 pallets of ice, Grosso added. The freezer went online last week.

"We've been looking at (Moses Lake) for a number of years," Grosso said. "We have a contract with Safeway, Albertsons, Wal-Mart, currently, and they've been asking us for the last couple of years to come over and service this area, but we couldn't justifiably do it. This building happened to become available … We looked at it and we thought, 'OK, here's the opportunity.'"

Grosso has a history of taking advantage of opportunities with ice. When he was 15 years old, Grosso's parents owned a little motel complete with an ice maker, he explained. Grosso and his brother Dan knew a grocery store owner, and offered to bag the ice and sell it to the owner.

"At that time they could only sell it by vending machines," Grosso recalled. "So my brother and I would bag it up in little plastic bags, we'd put it in the back of my mom's car and we'd take it down to that little grocery store. That's how it started, and it went from one to the next to the next to the next."

Dan died about 10 years ago, but John Grosso said the business, which he owns with his wife, has been good to him.

"Over the years, it's just grown a little bit here and a little bit there," he said. "We are now the largest manufacturing plant and distribution center north of Sacramento and west of Chicago. We had some big ice companies when I first started getting in the business and really started going, we had some big companies that had been around for 100 years, but they didn't take care of the customer. We just plugged along, we took care of our customers, we did what we could when we could. One by one by one, we gained the customer, their loyalty, and they would leave the big boys and eventually the big boys were gone."

The company manufactures in Seattle and Coeur d'Alene, and will ship to Moses Lake via truck from both locations. The company produces a 7-pound party bag, a 10-pound party bag, a 10-pound block, a 20-pound party bag, a 40-pound bulk party bag and a 300-pound carving block.

The Moses Lake location will employ three to four people this year.

"Eventually we will be supplying this whole geographical area," Russo said. "And when I say this whole area, I mean Moses Lake, Wenatchee, Ellensburg, Coulee City, maybe all the way down into Tri-Cities, out of this plant. We are here to service (customers). Our goal is to give them perfect service: When they want ice, we are here to take care of them."

For more information, contact district manager Brian Nielson at 509-350-0325.