Matthew Tuerk

And that's what made it such a strong destination for some of the e-com.

But it's also like that, you go back to like why it is a vibrant economic region is that

It's a great place for weight-gaining industries.

The other big thing we worked on at the Regional Economic Development Corporation was we recruited Ocean Spray to make most of its great cranberry juice in the Lehigh Valley.

Sam Adams was brewing most of its beer

in the lehigh valley was it weight gaining industry yeah anything you add water to basically right so you when you have the cranberries come into the plant like to become cranberry juice you add a ton of water it doesn't make sense to produce that far away and then ship all that water so because you're not just you know within a day's drive of 40 of this population you're also close to new york so a lot of like curry dr pepper has a big production plant there's a lot of

food manufacturing that occurs there as well.

And then on the manufacturing side, you also, because of the e-comm, because of the food manufacturing, you saw a lot of packaging and bottling manufacturing show up.

So one of our most recent in Allentown successes was recruiting a company called Schless Bottle that manufactures bottles for beverages.

And they wanted to be close to the production point.

So the manufacturing bottles in Allentown

filling it with beverages and shipping it back to New York.

It's odd that you mentioned plastic bags because one of the things we recruited as I was

kind of leaving the world of economic development and going to politics was a Turkish plastic bag manufacturer.

So that was kind of interesting.

So one of the things that distinguished the region, and I think is good for onshoring, and I want to go back on the onshoring thing for a second.

When we developed this strategy, when we're talking about onshoring and reshoring back in the early 2010s,

We didn't know a global pandemic was going to come and disrupt supply chains.

We were thinking about the logistics of making things close to the customer.

And I was thinking a lot about the theft of IP in China and how it was kind of like... Those components of globalism didn't make a ton of sense.