Wabash Plant In Little Falls Leads The Way | News

Wabash National Chief Strategy Officer Dustin Smith said his company's desire to create more environmentally friendly and sustainable solutions for its customers helped pave the way to its $23 million, 216-person expansion in Little Falls.

Wabash National plans to move its entire refrigerated trailer operation to its Little Falls plant. The move will mean an addition of more than 200 jobs and a $23 million investment into the community.

Little Falls is on the leading edge of what might be the future of the trucking industry.

Earlier this month, the Little Falls City Council and Morrison County Board of Commissioners voted to extend tax rebates of $50,000 and $40,000, respectively, given to Wabash National. The rebates were initially offered for 10 years in 2017 as an incentive for the company to operate a manufacturing facility out of the former Larson Boats plant.

In exchange for the extended incentives, Wabash — which makes semi trailers and other shipping equipment — will move its entire refrigerated operation to Little Falls. With that comes an increase of 216 jobs and a $23 million investment by the end of 2023.

“We’re on track for about $2.5 billion in revenue this year and substantially higher beyond that,” said Wabash Chief Strategy Officer Dustin Smith. “I’ll touch on how this technology in Little Falls is definitely core to our ability to grow the company.”

The company, which is headquartered in Lafayette, Indiana, operates 14 locations across the United States and Mexico. It employs more than 6,000 people, company-wide. It opened the Little Falls plant in 2017, and Smith has been a part of that expansion since the beginning.

He said the company first came to Little Falls when it was seeking partners to help explore a new technology for refrigerated trailers. Until 2017, he said everything related to the process was confined to research and development and “test lab-type environments.” However, the tech was beginning to show enough promise that Wabash was looking to scale up with a partner.

“Believe it or not, we actually stumbled into Little Falls, Minnesota, through the Larson Boat business because we found them as a manufacturing technology that had striking similarities to the technology that we were developing,” Smith said. “Our earliest conversation was actually with Larson to be a supplier to Wabash and help us find a better way to actually manufacture the technology.”

He said that conversation quickly evolved from one of partnership to the possibility of Wabash acquiring the facility.

Since then, Smith said he has visited Little Falls “a couple of dozen times,” at which time he always finds himself in front of the entire workforce. Consistently, he said he has explained to them that what is being done in Little Falls is exciting, “because we’re trying to do something that’s never been done before.”

He said the first couple of years were focused on trying to prove out the technology, particularly relative to meeting customer needs. It also needed to do so in a way that was profitable.

Just in the last couple of years, Smith said Wabash is starting to receive some excellent feedback tied to what is now known as its EcoNex technology, all of which is produced in Little Falls. The company has received awards from groups such as the Indiana Manufacturer’s Association, Newsweek and Heavy Duty Trucking Magazine because of its environmental innovation and sustainability tied to EcoNex.

“The biggest driver of us making change for the positive, or change for the good, is driven by the technology that we’re producing in Minnesota,” Smith said.

Smith said he likes to describe EcoNex — a “substantially complex” technology” — in three phases. All of them happen in Little Falls, and create a product that is much different from most trailers on the road.

During the first phase, he said extruded foam bricks wrapped in glass and fiberglass called prisma beams are placed into a mold that can be up to 60 feet long. At that point, resin is applied and the beam is put into a cold plate, or vacuum.

This results in the formation of a one-piece, 53-foot semi trailer wall. It does not use any steel or rivets in the sidewall.

“Even if you’re not in the trailer industry like I am, you can appreciate and even start to think about every other semi trailer that you see on the highway, even a refrigerated trailer like we’re talking about today, it’s produced virtually the same,” Smith said.

That process, he said, starts with aluminum coils rolled into a sheered length for the outside skin of the trailer. Holes are smashed into it and all of those aluminum sheets are fastened together with rivets. On the inside, there are steel or metal posts that act like studs in a wall.

On the inside of the trailer, a plastic liner is connected and, once the wall is constructed, it is insulated by pulling a foam tube through the entire sidewall. The rivets, Smith said, are “terrible for thermal efficiency.”

The EcoNex panels produced in Little Falls are fully encapsulated in resin, and they turn into the semi trailer itself.

“We’re talking about substantially higher thermal efficiency, 15-30%,” Smith said. “That range is largely because of the various specifications from our customers.”

The EcoNex production method also prevents water intrusion from humidity and water on the highway. Smith said even the smallest crevice in the trailer can serve as a vacuum for moisture. That can get trapped and build up inside the sidewall.

Smith said Wabash has test results that show the average trailer gains almost 100 pounds in water over the course of a year.

“Not only does that prevent the trailer from hauling as much freight as it could otherwise, it’s a terrible thermal disadvantage having water in your sidewalls,” he said. “That also breaks down the foam, which deteriorates quicker. What you end up with is a less thermally efficient trailer than it was before, as well as a trailer that’s not going to last as long.”

He said EcoNex is proving out not only by the number of trailers Wabash is putting on the road, but also by the miles and customers hauling freight with the products manufactured in Little Falls.

All of this relates to environmental practices and sustainability, which Smith said is something businesses cannot ignore. When the EcoNex technology was first conceived in 2017, he said it was rooted in the spirit of making sure Wabash could give the customer something “they never dreamed was possible.”

He said Wabash’s customers include Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, FedEx and other large, multinational corporations. Whether it is because of regulations or social pressure, he said they are all taking on the responsibility of being environmentally friendly.

“You can appreciate the pressures they are under to find a more sustainable way of conducting their business,” Smith said. “We’re taking advantage of that by thinking about how our technology is more thermally efficient than the next-best alternative.”

He said if every refrigerated trailer on the highway was replaced by an EcoNex trailer produced in Little Falls, because of its thermal efficiency, it would save about $2 billion per year in diesel costs over the next best alternative. That is despite the fact the cooling system on the trailer is operated by a diesel-powered air conditioner, a separate fuel source from the tractor.

He said, if every trailer was replaced with EcoNex, it would be the equivalent of taking 800,000 cars off of the road an annual basis from an emissions standpoint.

“I think that’s a meaningful impact, because not only am I providing hard savings to the customer because they can operate equipment with lower operating costs, but we’re actually emitting substantially less greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, and that is good for everybody,” Smith said. “I think there’s no denying that.”

In the last two years, in particular, he said the conversations with customers have gone from them remarking that it was interesting technology to them saying they “need this.”

A lot of that, he said, has helped create the demand to bring the EcoNex technology up to scale, which directly relates to the investment and expansion in Little Falls.

The EcoNex trailers aren’t all that is being produced at the Little Falls facility, however. Smith said for smaller truck bodies such as those used by Kroger for home grocery delivery, a kit using the technology is built in Little Falls. It is then sent to one of the facilities where the trucks themselves are manufactured and employees assemble it and mount it onto the truck chassis.

“Now you have technology coming out of Little Falls that’s getting into a market, grocery home delivery, that has only scratched the surface in terms of how big that marketplace will be,” Smith said. “A lot of research shows that grocery home delivery will more than double in the next four years.”

He said this was an example of how critical the operation in Little Falls is to the success of other Wabash plants across the country.

At the same time that became apparent, Smith said Wabash had generated enough demand from customers that it felt confident it had enough mixture of demand and its ability to invest further in the technology to scale up its manufacturing capacity.

Initially, Wabash planned to add 140 new jobs and invest $14 million in Little Falls for an additional five years in tax incentives. However, during discussions with his Board of Directors, Smith said it became apparent that the facility was capable of doing even more for Wabash.

It’s an investment he said they are happy and confident to be making.

“Would we feel our best case — let’s say lowest risk, highest confidence for scaling up as aggressively as we could — what if we put all that time, energy, money into Little Falls and try to pull ahead our ramp up as aggressively as possible?” Smith said. “It was decided, if we could get the right cooperation with everyone, that we’d have our best odds of success by kind of pushing it all into Little Falls for these next two phases.”

“The biggest driver of us making change for the positive, or change for the good, is driven by the technology that we’re producing in Minnesota." - Dustin Smith, Wabash National chief strategy officer

Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items.

Your comment has been submitted.

There was a problem reporting this.

Keep it Clean. Please avoid obscene, vulgar, lewd, racist or sexually-oriented language. PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR CAPS LOCK. Don't Threaten. Threats of harming another person will not be tolerated. Be Truthful. Don't knowingly lie about anyone or anything. Be Nice. No racism, sexism or any sort of -ism that is degrading to another person. Be Proactive. Use the 'Report' link on each comment to let us know of abusive posts. Share with Us. We'd love to hear eyewitness accounts, the history behind an article.

Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup.

Error! There was an error processing your request.