United Supermarkets has bought 15 acres near Ft. Worth, Texas’ Alliance Airport, with plans to build a 200,000-square-foot distribution center to serve 16 locations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Abilene and Wichita Falls. The company currently has just one DC, located in its hometown of Lubbock, Texas, to service the 50 stores it operates in the state under the United Supermarkets, Market Street and Amigos United banners.

Six of those stores are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, four of them having opened within a 14-month period ending April 1, 2009.

Construction on the new facility, which will be located in the city of Roanoke, north of Fort Worth, is slated to start by mid-November and finish by Sept. 1, 2010, according to United, which added that the DC will also serve as a consolidation point for shipments on their way to Lubbock.

United VP of logistics Robert Taylor said that 100 percent of the grocer’s frozen food, 90 percent of its produce and 75 percent of its dry grocery would originate from the new DC, thus freeing up space at the company’s 500,000-square-foot Lubbock facility, which he acknowledged has been operating at “maximum capacity” for some time.

Exel, the Westerville, Ohio-based logistics company that operates the Lubbock DC, will also run the new facility, which initially will employ about 75 Exel workers, but “[w]e have provisions in place for future expansion of the new facility if necessitated by company growth,” noted Taylor. Those provisions include the option to purchase additional land, United spokesman Eddie Owens told Progressive Grocer.