The Legacy Companies, a food service and consumer appliance company, will create 60 full-time jobs and invest nearly $6.7 million in Bourbon County, Kentucky. The company plans to revitalize a recently closed facility.

Legacy will locate in the former Hearth & Home Technologies building, a 277,000-square-foot facility on Cleveland Drive in Paris. Hearth & Home laid off about 220 employees after announcing in February 2016 it would close the majority of its Bourbon County operations.

Legacy’s investment and job creation comes in response to organic growth and recent acquisitions. The privately owned Fort Lauderdale, Florida, based company grew from 75 employees in 2009 to more than 500 today with sales in excess of $250 million, according to Kentucky officials. The Kentucky location will help the company better serve a large percentage of its customers while lowering logistics costs and decreasing its time to market. Legacy’s executives are working to buy the building and anticipate adding jobs immediately after the signing. They anticipate going operational within three months of purchase, primarily as a distribution facility with some manufacturing.

“This move will help expand our capabilities and also allow us to be more centrally located for our existing customer base,” said Neal Asbury, CEO of The Legacy Companies. “This distribution center is an impactful asset that provides added opportunity for us to offer and deliver better customer service than ever before. As we settle in, we will be adding more people the staff and we are excited about that too.”

“Kentucky has an ever increasing presence in the food and beverage sector, and The Legacy Companies will be a tremendous addition to the industry in our state,” Governor Matt Bevin said. “The jobs created through this investment will positively impact individual families, the Bourbon County community, and the surrounding Bluegrass region. We look forward to celebrating Legacy’s continued growth and success in the commonwealth.”

To encourage the investment and job growth in the community, the Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority (KEDFA) in April preliminarily approved the company for tax incentives up to $600,000 through the Kentucky Business Investment program. The performance-based incentive allows a company to keep a portion of its investment over the agreement term through corporate income tax credits and wage assessments by meeting job and investment targets.

In addition, Legacy can receive resources from the Kentucky Skills Network. Through the Kentucky Skills Network, companies can receive no-cost recruitment and job placement services, reduced-cost customized training and job training incentives. In fiscal 2017, the Kentucky Skills Network provided training for more than 120,000 Kentuckians and 5,700 companies from a variety of industry sectors.