About American Foods

American Foods Group deals with all things meat – mostly processing beef but some pork and poultry as well. They have multiple divisions: fresh ground beef and specialty cuts; foodservice for restaurants; retail and grocery stores; international supply chain and school nutrition efforts to help kids get quality protein.

American Foods needed a new space for the company’s IT Department. They were currently crammed into every closet and corner of the main building but needed to hire more people for their growing company. They wanted a space that would help them attract new talent and cater to the “millennial” mentality of flexible spaces, casual meeting areas, and open concepts. They purchased an existing building across the street from the main AFG location and gutted the entire thing.

Since this building was going to be strictly IT folks, they wanted it to be techy and modern. They were comfortable with bright colors and creating a funky vibe to play off the old brick aesthetic of the building they purchased.

EBI needed to incorporate different types of meeting spaces – a quick vendor drop-in area, a more comfortable meeting room for the executive team to have longer meetings, a training room that could be easily configured based on large meeting sizes or training classes, a small collaborative space for an individual team on the mezzanine, and a contractor room for outside individuals to work within the building for contract work.

What We Did

We started with an inspiration fabric for the color palette and the design took off from there. With this being the IT department, every person was going to have three monitors on their height-adjustable desk, which proved a challenge to accommodate nearly 60 inches of screen space! Storage wasn’t as big a need because they are mostly paperless, working on their computers all day. We gave each person in workstations and private offices a tower with a coat hook for storage of Wisconsin winter coats, boots, and purses so the workspace could be kept clear of these items.

EBI was very involved throughout the construction process on the project management team to ensure that the building best suited the customer. We provided detailed electrical plans for individual offices, and floor core locations for the training room and workstations. We also did flooring and paint finish plans for the subcontractors.