A start-up manufacturer that broke ground in Anderson with much fanfare nearly four years ago has finally launched production — but in a different, temporary location.
US-Offsite , a building company co-founded by Dan Ferreira, opened its production plant last fall on Meadow View Drive east of Airport Road in south Redding.
Currently, the plant has 30 employees, but there are plans to add more workers to meet demand, Chief Financial Officer Alex Shea recently told me.
“It feels great. I think the part that’s fun is watching the guys thrive,” CEO Ferreira said one recent weekday as his employees were framing modules for an affordable housing project in San Benito that the company is partnering with a prison manufacturing program to do. “Even though it’s smaller than the final version, it has the qualities, so that gets me pumped.”
The final version will be a 200,000-square-foot plant on Industry Road just east of Barney Road in Anderson. The goal is to employ 200 workers.
Shea said they hope to start construction this fall. "If we hit our milestones, we plan on having the doors open next fall, 2025," he said.
When Ferreira announced in spring 2020 that they had picked Anderson to build their first production plant, it was a big deal for a community that is still reeling from the loss of Shasta Paper Co., which employed 400 people before closing nearly 25 years ago.
Jeff Kiser, then Anderson’s city manager, called it a historic economic development project for his community, “the biggest resurgence in the city of Anderson since the timber days.”
But after pouring the concrete foundation at the 33-acre site in Anderson, the project went silent, leaving some to wonder if it ever was going to happen.
Shea said coming out of the pandemic they realized that they wanted to take away some of the risk of building and opening a large plant, so they chose to lease the building on Meadow View and open a small-scale version of their grand vision.
“So, it was a business decision to stair up our way” to Anderson, said Shea, who ran for Redding City Council but lost in 2022.
Shea said he ran for council to help create jobs in the North State. Working at US-Offsite is a way to do that, he added.
US-Offsite makes prefabricated modules for multi-family and commercial projects, such as apartments, hotels, student housing, even disaster-relief housing for victims of wildfire or hurricanes.
The company currently is doing a lot of work for customers on the Central Coast in communities like San Luis Obispo and Santa Maria, Ferreira said: “So, we are able to introduce a whole new community to a new way of building."
But US-Offsite also is doing work for customers in the North State, a duplex project in Cottonwood and cabins in Dunsmuir.
The company calls it reverse engineering buildings into LEGO blocks, which are built at the plant and then shipped to the project site.
“So much of your construction challenge is the labor market you’re in, the availability to people, commuting people there. We take all that out. So now, if you’re a developer and you’re looking at downtown L.A. or you’re looking at out in the desert, we have a fixed build cost and a reliable fixed build cost,” Ferreira said.
David Benda covers business , development and anything else that comes up for the USA TODAY Network in Redding. He also writes the weekly "Buzz on the Street" column. He’s part of a team of dedicated reporters that investigate wrongdoing, cover breaking news and tell other stories about your community. Reach him on X, formerly Twitter @DavidBenda_RS or by phone at 530-338-8323. To support and sustain this work, please subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Redding Record Searchlight: The Buzz: Redding manufacturing startup plans to create 200 new jobs in the North State
Most Popular
Comments / 0