It took years to put together the multiple adjacent acres of land Miceli Dairy Products needed to break ground on a $13-million expansion project just off Cleveland’s Opportunity Corridor.

The 32,000 square feet of state-of-the-art cold storage Miceli’s plans to complete in April 2026 was made possible in large part by partnering with the Cuyahoga Land Bank, explains Maria Miceli, vice president of marketing and third generation of the founding family.

The Land Bank was integral in securing a $2 million in Ohio brownfield funding for the remediation of the Gray Barrel & Drum Co., a storage drum incineration and reconditioning facility – which was fined $1.5 million by the EPA and state of Ohio.

Assembling the individual, contiguous parcels needed for the large facility’s footprint near where the original Miceli site was a priority, explains Maria Miceli, vice president of marketing and third generation of the founding family.

“My dad and my uncle were adamant about cleaning the property up – first because this is where we make our product but also for the overall benefit of the neighborhood,” Miceli said. “It took several years, and the Land Bank worked hard to help us assemble this land. We had to find different groups of ownership and work through a lot of liens and back taxes that were owed.”

Miceli's Dairy receives 10 milk deliveries daily using Cleveland's Opportunity Corridor
Miceli Dairy

Miceli’s is dedicated to keeping and growing, the nearly 75-year-old company, known for its Italian cheeses, including ricotta, provolone, fresh mozzarella and mascarpone, within the city of Cleveland’s borders.

The third-generation family business has grown to be one of the largest Italian cheese producers in the country and boasts 13 family members working at the East 90th Street where John Miceli, a milk delivery man turned cheese producer, started the business after immigrating from Italy.

The company has grown consistently throughout the years, currently employing about 250 people with plans to increase that number to 300 by the end of 2026, Miceli said.

Miceli’s expansion comes on the heels of the opening of Cleveland’s Opportunity Corridor in 2021. The multi-lane east-to-west roadway provides a direct route to I-490 improving logistics and accessibility for crucial deliveries and distribution, and makes it easier to bring in visitors and employees, Miceli points out.

“It great for our trucks. It provides a direct path for our milk deliveries, which we get about 10 times a day,” Miceli explains. “It’s also great for our existing employees and for recruiting more workers. It’s also great for visitors and customers to show them the real Cleveland when they drive here.

There is also about 1,000 acres surrounding the three-miles of Opportunity Corridor, just a block from Miceli’s production facility. 

The land assembly of just one six-acre plot that Miceli’s wanted for the most recent expansion included dealing with everything from tax delinquencies, property in probate, properties abandoned by owners, and parcels with blighted and burnt down buildings, Kim Steigerwald, Cuyahoga Land Bank’s director of acquisition and disposition said.

“Land assembly in these old neighborhoods can take years. Sometimes we must negotiate with current owners. We’ve had to work with utility companies that had investment in the area and that was a lot of red tape to go through,” Steigerwald said. “There has been a lot of properties in this neighborhood where we can’t easily track down the owner.”

Steigerwald said even with the Land Bank’s help, some parcels that have been particularly difficult. Some are tied up in estates with multiple heirs for what she says is, “an eternity.”

“We’re trying to acquire a property for the Food Bank, and it is part of a probate with multiple siblings, and all the siblings have to transfer their interest to the one owner. We had to create a couple fun databases so that they can find and call all the phone numbers associated with the land,” Steigerwald added.

Properties owned by LLCs are another challenge. The companies will stay current on taxes for land with relatively low value in an effort to wait out the market. The work to unravel deed ownership is so time consuming and difficult that sometimes companies are forced to hire private investigators to help.

Land assembly work by the Land Bank, Miceli stresses, has been and will be crucial for the company’s upcoming $128 million phase two and three of expansion planned for just west and north of the manufacturing facility built in 2010.

“The whole Buckeye-Woodland neighborhood is undergoing a little renaissance right now,” she continued. “The Land Bank has helped us with abandoned property the city owned that we had been maintaining. What the Land Bank did was assemble the whole group of parcels together as one purchase.”

Even with the unique challenges of land assembly in the mixed residential/commercial neighborhood around Miceli, the company and its multi-family owners plan to stay and grow.

“We are growing and growing our employee base here,” Miceli said. “A lot of our workers are from the neighborhood and actually walk in looking for jobs. We provide solid jobs, overtime, benefits, and we have a lot of employees with us for 20-30 years, and then they bring their whole families here. This is a family business but it’s not just my family. We have a lot of families that work here, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.”