CLEVELAND — A family-owned business is plotting a move on Cleveland’s East Side, bringing life back to a nearly 10-acre site near the Opportunity Corridor.
Reese Consumer Health plans to build its new offices and consolidated production-and-distribution hub at Woodland Avenue and Woodhill Road. The Cleveland City Planning Commission approved preliminary designs for building on Friday morning.
The $18 million project will keep a fourth-generation business in the city while giving Reese much-needed room to grow. The company procures and packages over-the-counter medicines, supplements and medical devices that are sold by retailers across the country.
“You’re not gonna see Reese Consumer Health on the shelf,” said Jeff Reese, the company’s president. “But a lot of the products an everyday consumer would purchase could potentially come from us.”
Ken Basch Jr./News 5
Reese’s great-grandfather was a pharmacist who opened a drugstore at East 59th Street and Woodland in 1907. “He ended up compounding and mixing his own formulas, from what I’m told, in his basement,” Reese said.
The company moved into manufacturing and, over time, shifted from making its own products to contracting with other manufacturers. Reese packages private-label brands for drug stores, like CVS and Walgreens, and name-brand products for health care companies.
The business also owns a few in-house brands that it sells to dollar stores, regional drug-store chains and grocers. But for the last few years, Reese hasn’t been able to grow.
Its 65 employees are spread across two older production facilities, about 3 miles apart. So Reese has to shuttle products, packages and people back and forth. And aging spaces make it hard to win over new customers – and attract and keep employees.
“We’re wildly inefficient. There’s a ton of waste. There’s a lot of duplication,” Reese said, while sitting in a lab-turned-conference room at the company’s longtime home in the Fairfax neighborhood, near the Cleveland Clinic.
Ken Basch Jr./News 5
The company owns that building, tucked away on Frank Avenue. Its other production facility is a leased space off East 40th Street.
By moving, Reese will be able to bring everything under one brand-new roof. Renderings produced by the Bialosky architecture firm show a 75,000-square-foot building, with room to add 50,000 additional square feet over time, as the company expands.
Bialosky
“There’s a ton of opportunity out there,” Reese said, citing the growth of the wellness industry and interest in vitamins, supplements and other personal-health products. “We’ve experienced it. We’ve had to turn it down. And we just simply can’t continue to do that.”
But the company wanted to stay in Cleveland, close to its roots – and its workforce. Reese estimates that 70% of his employees live in the surrounding neighborhood.
“We could have easily gone elsewhere,” he said. “I’m sure there would have been incentive to go elsewhere. But it was really important to us to stay in the community where the company was started.”
Reese considered several sites on the East Side before focusing on Woodland and Woodhill. The property there is currently owned by Cleveland’s industrial-commercial land bank and an affiliate of Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, a local nonprofit.
Last year, the city’s Board of Control agreed to sell the land to Reese for $900,600 – minus the cost of any environmental clean-up, according to public records.
In 2019, the city demolished the old Victoreen Instrument Co. plant on Woodland to eliminate blight and prepare the site for redevelopment. The factory, where workers made radiation-measurement equipment and other devices, had been vacant since 1994.
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“It was a huge day,” said City Council President Blaine Griffin, who represents the neighborhood. “The community came out to celebrate tearing down that building.”
Now it’s time to re-imagine the site. On Friday, Griffin stood in the snow at one edge of the property and pointed out how the area is changing. Down the street, a bright mural covers a brick wall around a Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority bus maintenance garage.
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Across Woodhill, the former Woodhill Homes public-housing site has been cleared to make way for new, mixed-income housing. The massive, multi-phase project is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a part of the city once known as “the forgotten triangle.”
Just around the corner, the Opportunity Corridor snakes across the East Side, linking Interstate 490 at East 55th Street to University Circle. The boulevard opened in 2021 and is lined with vacant land, including properties the city is trying to reposition for new uses.
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Private investment is picking up, following all that public money, Griffin said.
“Now, it’s time to build,” he added, describing the Reese Consumer Health project as the type of development the neighborhood needs.
“We don’t want a bunch of gas stations selling Black & Milds and liquor to our community,” he said. “We want good-paying jobs. We want affordable housing.”
Griffin said he’s putting $50,000 of his discretionary ward funds into the Reese deal. The company is also in talks about potential incentives from the city, Cuyahoga County and the state.
The company could grow to 110 to 115 employees within five years of moving, Reese said.
“Depending on the areas of the business that we grow, that could potentially be even more,” he added, describing that hiring estimate as “conservative.”
And he believes the company can dramatically boost sales, from $25 million a year to $200 million a year, over a decade in the new building.
“We’re bringing specialty manufacturing jobs to the city of Cleveland. We’re in the city limits. We are a legacy business in Cleveland. We’re deciding to stay. … I don’t think you see that very often,” he said.
The company hopes to break ground in April or May and to start moving production into the facility in late 2026 or early 2027. Reese hopes other businesses will take notice.
“We want to be a catalyst for this area,” he said. “We want to break ground and get our new facility up and going and experience the growth that we’re anticipating. … We’re excited to be a part of, hopefully, the next generation that is able to take this distressed area and revive it to what it once was.”
Michelle Jarboe is the business growth and development reporter at News 5 Cleveland. Follow her on X @MJarboe or email her at Michelle.Jarboe@wews.com.
