Originally Posted By bizjournals.com
Lisa Schalk never thought she’d be so excited over a warehouse. But Schalk, who co-owns Toffee to Go with her husband, Jim Schalk, can’t contain her glee as she walks through the 16,000-square-foot industrial building in Pinellas Park, pointing out the wall where three stoves will be lined up, tripling their toffee-making capacities.
Lisa Schalk never thought she’d be so excited over a warehouse.
But Schalk, who co-owns Toffee to Go with her husband, Jim Schalk, can’t contain her glee as she walks through the 16,000-square-foot industrial building in Pinellas Park, pointing out the wall where three stoves will be lined up, tripling their toffee-making capacities. Then there’s space that will be built out into offices and showing the room that will become an employee lounge when the business moves — all of it delights Schalk, who launched the business out of her home a dozen years ago.
The Schalks closed on the building in late May, paying $525,000 for the building and planning to invest $200,000 in the buildout of the space and moving costs. Construction on the office space and a few other improvements to the building — the former home of Red Smith Florida, a pickling company — is slated to begin in the next few days.
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Thomas Grandoff, an associate broker with JLL in Tampa, represented the Schalks in the transaction.
The Schalks had been seeing steady growth in their South Tampa toffee business — run out of a 3,000-square-foot storefront on Bay-to-Bay Boulevard — for years, maintaining a number of large corporate accounts, among them PNC Bank and FedEx. But after Oprah endorsed their toffee last fall, sales spiked 60 percent and haven't receded.
That growth has driven the need for the new production facility, where Toffee to Go will now be able to produce up to 3,000 pounds of toffee per day. It will also be easier to receive deliveries and ship toffee out of the new location, Schalk said. It has one loading dock, a marked improvement from the small residential roads in South Tampa, where loading and unloading were constant struggles.
The South Tampa storefront will remain open after the production component moves, slated for mid-October. Click through the photos for a virtual tour of the toffee-making process and a preview of the new facility.