OUR FACILITIES Our headquarters in Norway, Iowa, is home to our corporate offices, our customer service and sales departments, and wholesale distribution facilities. The original building in this complex was remodeled in 2010 to provide a new entryway and expanded, improved space for our Co-op Café, departmental offices and labs. The remodel was awarded Silver Leed status in 2011. Our sustainably managed 56-acre Norway site includes 198,765 sq. ft. of connected building space, our 8,460 sq. ft. Innovation Center, a restored wetland, a small wildlife pond, a restored tallgrass prairie, and several stands of trees. All of the landscape is managed organically, and the buildings and parking lot are greenscaped — they are planted with hardy native trees and shrubs that need minimal care and no watering. The parking lot is designed to handle most rainwater runoff through bioswales that flow into the wetland. Our Aura Cacia plant, located in Urbana, Iowa, is a remodeled coffee facility that sits on 4.9 acres. The 25,500 sq. ft. facility is home to Aura Cacia’s manufacturing and Quality Assurance. We purchased a warehouse building in 2011 in North Liberty, Iowa, and repurposed it for raw material storage and processing of our herbs and spices. This 150,111 sq. ft. of added space has allowed us to operate more efficiently and safely, with particular focus on our food safety initiatives. In 2015, we purchased a 240,000 sq. ft. building that had sat relatively unused for five years in the small town of Belle Plaine, Iowa, and repurposed it into a distribution facility, restoring the building and bringing jobs back to the area. Numerous sustainability initiatives were included in the repur- posing of the building, including lighting, insulation, and landscaping. A system was developed to pump water away from the building and into retention ponds, and a new channeling system was installed to distribute rain water from the roof more evenly. The runoff systems were developed with the help of the Department of Natural Resources and Corps of Engineers as part of a flood mitiga- tion system to avoid any potential impact on the Iowa River or neighboring land. The system involves a combination of natural grass planted in the floodplain, pumps and filters to capture sediment and any potential contaminants, and diversion of the runoff into retention ponds.
OUR PRODUCTS Frontier Co-op provides botanical and botanically based products that support a natural lifestyle. Our product objective is to provide safe, high-quality branded products that are compliant with all regulations while meeting the needs of our customers. Our products fall into two categories or business units: 1. Food & Flavorings: Foods & Flavorings includes Frontier Co-op bulk spices, herbs, food ingredients, teas, and seasonings and Frontier Co-op and Simply Organic brands of bottled spices, seasonings and flavors. 2. Essentials: Essentials includes Aura Cacia essential oils, bath products and other botanical-based aromatherapy personal care products. We also maintain our own distribution business that services natural product stores, buying clubs and other retailers with more than 7,500 products across more than 325 brands, as well as 1,500 of our own branded products.
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