SMYRNA — Procter & Gamble will be the first tenant of the Duck Creek Business Campus, signing a lease with KRM Development Corporation for 70,000 square feet of space for its second Delaware warehouse.
The multinational consumer goods company signed a lease in March through the broker JLL, and are reportedly working on fitting out the flex building. Procter & Gamble has a Dover plant off Route 15 that manufactures Pampers Sensitive and Complete Clean wipes and distributes Pampers Aqua Pure and Luvs wipes.
Kent Economic Partnership Executive Director Linda Parkowski recently told Kent County officials that Procter & Gamble approached her as they searched for additional warehouse space.
At the Duck Creek Business Campus warehouse, Procter & Gamble will use it as a secondary location. Right now, the company employs roughly 190 people in central Delaware and it’s unknown how many more employees this second facility will add. Procter & Gamble were unable to be reached for comment as of press time.
“Procter & Gamble, Kraft Heinz and a lot of our large manufacturers rent space in Hurlock, Md., because we don’t have the amount of warehousing space that they need right here,” she told the Kent County Levy Court on April 5. “They weren’t aware of Duck Creek Business Campus, and we helped put two and two together. We’re very excited about this.”
Duck Creek Business Campus was a project years in the making, as KRM Development bought the 220 acres of farmland off U.S. Route 13 in 2003. In late 2020, KRM Development broke ground on its first building, tentatively planning roughly 1 million to 1.5 million square feet, depending on demand.
In total, Duck Creek Business Campus is estimated to draw up to 4,000 jobs and $477 million in economic development to Delaware’s smallest county in the next 20 years.
KRM Development, the real estate arm of the Dixon Group of Chestertown, has built its name with two business parks in Maryland that range in leases from 60,000 to 100,000 square feet. Duck Creek is among the group’s first large-scale investments in Delaware.
The company has already indicated they are bullish about its Smyrna investment. Less than a month after finishing the first speculative building, KRM Development already started discussions on constructing a second spec building totaling 133,000 square feet. Smyrna Planning Director Jeremy Rothwell said that he expects to see the final plans on the second building in the next few months.
However, a larger prospect for the Duck Creek Business Park may be on the rise. Parkowski said the KEP worked with an undisclosed site selector on a 338,000-square-foot warehouse currently dubbed “Project Press.” The warehouse would require 800 parking spaces and bring approximately 300 to 400 jobs, Parkowski said.
“That site selector worked with the Amazon project that ended up going to Seaford. But they [the selector] didn’t forget about us and brought us this,” Parkowski said.
