ARCO Design/Build has named Brian Shoop Director of Process Engineering for its Food & Beverage business, adding a 16-year industry veteran to anchor the firm's turnkey offering for food and beverage manufacturing clients. The hire is a deliberate move up the food supply chain for a company that has spent more than three decades building the cold storage and distribution infrastructure that sits downstream from production.
Shoop joins from Gray, where he held the title of Vice President and led that firm's Process Engineering practice. His work has centered on helping food and beverage manufacturers design and optimize production processes and facilities with an emphasis on operational performance, product safety, and long-term reliability — a résumé that maps directly onto the compliance-intensive demands of food-grade construction.
Why the Hire Matters
For food and beverage manufacturers, facility development typically involves sequencing a process engineering firm before handing off to a design-build contractor — a handoff that costs time and introduces coordination risk. ARCO's pitch is integration: process design, architectural engineering, and construction under one accountable partner. Adding Shoop's expertise in-house is intended to eliminate that gap and compress the timeline from concept to first-production run.
Aaron Weir, President of ARCO Design/Build, framed the strategic logic plainly: housing process engineering under the same roof as the construction team gives clients a single point of accountability and a smoother path from concept to production. For operators commissioning new manufacturing capacity — whether for a product launch, a retail-channel expansion, or a co-packing commitment — schedule compression carries direct unit-economics value.
Shoop's own framing reinforced the urgency. "Behind every facility is a product launch, a retail commitment, a customer counting on capacity coming online," he said. "ARCO's delivery model is engineered for speed, and by putting process design inside that same model, we can take clients from concept to production faster than the traditional approach allows."
Supply Chain Context
The expansion into food manufacturing and processing facilities reflects a broader capital-investment cycle playing out across the food and beverage manufacturing sector. Domestic production capacity has been a pressure point since pandemic-era supply disruptions, and food manufacturers have accelerated facility upgrades and greenfield builds to reduce sourcing concentration and meet retailer demands for domestic supply. Design-build firms with integrated process engineering capabilities are positioned to capture that spending as clients prioritize speed-to-market over the traditional design-bid-build timeline.
ARCO's move to strengthen its process engineering bench also signals intensifying competition among design-build firms for food and beverage mandates. Shoop will bring additional visibility to the firm at the International Association for Food Protection Annual Meeting, held July 26–29 in New Orleans, where he will participate in a roundtable on asset lifecycle management in food manufacturing — covering how manufacturers can determine optimal equipment and facility lifespans while maintaining food safety standards throughout a plant's operating life.
Founded more than 30 years ago, ARCO operates more than 50 offices with over 1,800 associates nationwide and is 100% employee-owned through an ESOP structure. The Food & Beverage business is positioned as the company's next growth vertical, moving the firm upstream from cold storage into the processing and manufacturing facilities that feed that distribution network.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
