Bauducco Foods: A 159,900 SF Pre-Engineered Metal Building in Zephyrhills, FL

Building Overview

Panettone is not a product you buy for yourself. It is a bread you carry to somebody else’s house in December, which is how a bakery Carlo Bauducco started in São Paulo in 1952 ended up on tables in more than fifty countries. The building we put up in Zephyrhills is where the American version of that starts now.

Our scope was Phase One, the largest American plant the company has ever built. 205 feet wide, 780 feet long, 42 feet to the eave. I-Beam frame, 159,900 square feet of production and distribution under one roof, on a 72 acre campus off 6th Avenue that is planned to keep growing into the 2030s.

A food plant is a shell built around a process, and the process is still being designed while the shell goes up. Ovens, dust collection, refrigeration, make up air, process piping: all of it gets refined right up until the equipment is ordered, and every refinement lands on the building as a framed opening, a load, or a clearance.

The Roof Is Part of the Process

Ovens exhaust through the roof. Dust collection runs through it. Make up air, refrigeration, and process piping all penetrate it. On a bakery this size that adds up to far more framed openings than a warehouse with the same footprint, and every one has to be engineered into the structure before the steel is manufactured.

We engineered a large quantity of them into the original design. Then the equipment plan kept moving, the way equipment plans do, and more openings were requested after the building was engineered and standing.

Those are two different jobs. An opening designed at the engineering stage is a line on a drawing and a purlin in a different place. An opening added to a standing building is a field operation: load path, purlin spacing, panel cuts, and flashing on a roof that is already installed and already shedding Florida rain.

Three and a Half Acres of Water

159,900 square feet of roof is roughly three and a half acres. Central Florida takes on about fifty inches of rain a year, most of it in hard afternoon bursts between June and September, and all of it has to leave the building somewhere.

Standard gutter and downspout sizing was not going to move that volume. The oversized sections the building needed were not something our primary channel could produce on the schedule, so we sourced them through an alternate supplier in our network and discounted the material rather than passing the premium along.

Anchor Bolts

Erection stalled almost immediately. Anchor bolt placement did not match the approved layout, and at 780 feet, longer end to end than two football fields, that is a column line problem rather than a one column problem. Resetting concrete would have cost weeks that were not in the schedule.

We modified baseplates to work with the bolts where they sat, ran the modification through engineering, and had crews back on steel within days. Then we absorbed part of the repair cost instead of writing it as a change order.

Two Weeks of Trucks

A building this size arrives in pieces. Steel, panels, trim, and accessories came in across roughly two weeks of deliveries, sequenced so crews always had the next piece of the building in front of them instead of a yard full of material to sort through.

The accessory package alone generated a steady run of field questions, and our project manager worked those directly with the erection crews instead of routing them back through the office. That is the reason the roof never turned into rework. When the window compressed, we added manpower instead of moving the date.

The Yellow

Bauducco Yellow is not on any standard color chart. It has been on their packaging for decades, in more than fifty countries. We custom matched it, because a plant wearing the wrong yellow is a plant that does not look like it belongs to them.

Where It Landed

Bauducco opened the plant on June 26, 2026. It roughly doubles the manufacturing capacity the company had available here, and the campus is built to scale past a million square feet as that business grows.

Seventy four years after Carlo Bauducco started a bakery in São Paulo, his family put the biggest plant they have ever built in Pasco County, Florida. We are glad they let us build it, and we are still on the job finishing the last of the roof openings.