CONCORD, N.C. — Energy drink giant Red Bull, along with development partners Ball Corp. (NYSE: BALL) and Rauch North America, has broken ground on a 2.3 million-square-foot production, manufacturing and distribution bottling plant in Concord, a northeast suburb of Charlotte. The $1.5 billion investment, as disclosed by several media sources, is expected to begin operations in 2028, with maximized filling capacity anticipated by 2031.
The Charlotte Business Journal reports that the companies originally bought the 500-acre site at the former Philips Morris cigarette plant site, now rebranded as The Grounds, in 2021 for $55 million, after first announcing their plans to open a facility.
As additionally reported, the plan initially began as a $740 million project, but as the Cabarrus County Economic Development Corp. approved enhanced incentives in 2022, the project expanded.
The fully automated Red Bull plant will now offer 170,000 pallet spaces, as well as internal conveyor bridges for intralogistics that will connect can manufacturing to co-packing to warehousing, and lastly, directly to customer deliveries to “minimize carbon emissions.”
Ball Corp. will also build an 800,000-square-foot aluminum can plant at the industrial park. The company will produce packaging at the new facility for Red Bull, as well as other beverage clients.
The operation will fill up to 3 billion cans of Red Bull products annually and is stated to create up to 700 jobs upon full build-out.
The Concord bottling plant marks the second integrated manufacturing campus for Red Bull, Ball Corp. and Rauch in the United States, following the development of a can-filling facility in Glendale, Ariz., which began production in 2021.
Founded in the mid-1980s by Dietrich Mateschitz, Red Bull sold more than 12 billion cans globally in 2024 and reported a net sales growth of $11.7 billion last year, a 6.4 percent increase from 2023.
Colorado-based Ball Corp. is a beverage packing company that employs 16,000 people worldwide with a reported 2024 net worth of $11.8 billion. The company’s stock price closed on Thursday, Sept. 11 at $51.12 per share, down from $65.63 a year ago, a 22 percent decline.
Rauch North America Inc., a branch of the Austrian beverage company Rauch Fruchtsäfte, is a European fruit juice producer. Rauch specializes in filling cartons, cans and bottles for other beverage manufacturers as well, such as Red Bull.
— Abby Cox