VAN BUREN — Tessy Plastics has added a 260,000-square-foot expansion in a $31.6 million project at its plant located at 7474 State Fair Boulevard in the town of Van Buren. The family-owned and operated company has already hired 203 new full-time employees, supported by $13.5 million in state incentives, the office of Gov. Andrew Cuomo said […]
VAN BUREN — Tessy Plastics has added a 260,000-square-foot expansion in a $31.6 million project at its plant located at 7474 State Fair Boulevard in the town of Van Buren.
The family-owned and operated company has already hired 203 new full-time employees, supported by $13.5 million in state incentives, the office of Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a news release posted Aug. 1 on the governor’s website.
“What an impressive facility. It really is awesome, and it’s awesome that it’s here in Central New York,” Cuomo said to open his remarks at the Aug. 1 formal-opening event.
“We worked on this for over three years now, this addition,” Roland Beck, president of Tessy Plastics Corp., said in his remarks during the event.
The state incentives were a “huge reason” and its employees were “really the big reason” that Tessy Plastics decided to expand in Central New York, Beck added in his remarks.
The Hayner Hoyt Corporation of Syracuse handled construction on the addition to the Tessy Plastics facility, Beck told CNYBJ after the event.
The 203 new jobs is four times its original estimate of creating up to 50 new jobs by 2020, Cuomo’s office said.
The expansion project included the addition of a manufacturing facility to its existing plant in Van Buren.
The project also included the construction and addition of resin storage silos; material-handling system; chiller; production equipment; and upgrades to the facility’s electrical infrastructure.
New York Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Tessy’s expansion plans during a visit to the plant in July 2016.
Tessy Plastics, a plastics-parts manufacturer, had previously considered moving its operations to South Carolina.
“The end customers are in North Carolina and South Carolina, so we had a lot of reasons to go down to that area. The shipping costs for those projects is huge. We send 3,000 truck loads a year down to North and South Carolina … so they had a big advantage,” Beck told reporters after the event.
“I know that [Roland Beck] can tell you that they were courted heavily by the state of South Carolina and Gov. Cuomo did what we hoped he would do and put his team on it,” Onondaga County Executive Joanie Mahoney said in her remarks at the Aug. 1 event.
Established in 1973, Tessy Plastics makes products for the medical device and electronics industries, along with containers for consumer products, such as deodorant.
The expansion in Van Buren will focus on underarm-deodorant containers, Beck said in speaking with reporters after the formal-opening event.
During the event, Beck discussed the work that Tessy employees will handle in the Van Buren expansion.
“So we will mold and assemble a million underarm deodorant containers day, every single day of the year … We’ll do 400 million assembled underarm-deodorant containers a year,” he said.
Henry Beck, Roland Beck’s father, was among the original founders, the younger Beck told those gathered at the event. The company started as a 16,000-square-foot plant in Elbridge, he noted.
The firm’s operations now cover 1.6 million square feet in its Central New York locations, Beck added.
Besides locations in Elbridge, Van Buren, and Skaneateles, Tessy Plastics also has plants in Virginia and China.
