Nokian Tyres Expands Dayton Factory with 350,000 Square-Foot Warehouse

Nokian Tyres has begun construction on a finished goods warehouse at its Dayton, Tennessee production campus that will hold as many as 600,000 tires. The facility will be ready for use by mid-2024.

Nokian Tyres and its design-build construction firm, BC Construction Group, broke ground in early March on the 350,000 square-foot warehouse, designed by Pieper O’Brien Herr Architects. Nokian Tyres is continuing its long-term partnership with Faithful+Gould to provide project management services for the facility.

The new warehouse will sit adjacent to Nokian Tyres’ Dayton Factory, which is currently doubling production to manufacture as many as four million tires per year by 2024. The global tiremaker is hiring 125 team members to increase its workforce at the Southeast Tennessee campus to 475 employees.

The new storage space will join the company’s nine-warehouse network throughout the U.S. and Canada and will serve a growing volume of customers in the sun belt.

“As Nokian Tyres grows in Southeast Tennessee and throughout North America, this storage warehouse will help us manage the increased volume of tires flowing to our customers,” said Nokian Tyres Vice President of Passenger Car and LT Tires Tommi Heinonen. “It’s another step forward in our quest to deliver safe, sustainable tires for North American drivers.”

“As this marks our fourteenth tire facility build, we are proud to contribute our unique understanding and experience to this strategically important facility for Nokian Tyres,” said Chris Burns, President of BC Construction Group, Inc. “While we are a national company, BC Construction has a long resume of projects in the state of Tennessee, and we are always pleased to strengthen our ties to the community and our partners who work with us there.”

”Faithful+Gould is thrilled to continue the partnership with Nokian Tyres that started in 2017 for the construction of the Dayton Factory. We are happy to see Nokian Tyres grow and their continuous commitment to invest in the United States and East Tennessee,” said Faithful+Gould Senior Vice President Jonathan Marshall.

The warehouse serves as a high-tech complement to the Dayton Factory, which is one of the most advanced and sustainable tire production facilities in the world. Automated conveyors will deliver tires from the factory to the warehouse via an overhead bridge that connects the buildings. At the warehouse, they will be automatically stacked into steel storage racks without being touched by hand.

Nokian Tyres opened its Dayton Factory in fall 2019 and began producing tires for commercial sale in early 2020. The company is adding equipment inside the factory’s existing footprint that will enable it to double production of all-season and all-weather tires at the facility. The expansion will also allow Nokian Tyres to add light truck tires to the Dayton Factory’s product mix in 2023.

In its three-plus years of operations in Dayton, the company has earned recognition for its workplace culture, operations and sustainability. Nokian Tyres was the Chattanooga Regional Manufacturers Association’s Company of the Year in 2021, and the company was the first in Rhea County to receive the prestigious Tennessee Governor’s Environmental Stewardship Award.

The Dayton Factory’s production building is the only tire production facility in the world to possess LEED v4 Silver certification, and its LEED v4 Gold-certified administration building is fully powered by energy generated from onsite solar panels.

Source: Nokian Tyres