A refrigerated warehouse company plans to expand its facility in Franklin, investing $26 million and creating as many as 50 jobs by 2014.

Interstate Warehousing Inc., a unit of Fort Wayne-based Tippmann Group, currently occupies 428,000 square feet of space in Franklin. It plans to expand in two phases. The first expansion will add 140,000 square feet and is slated to be operating by July, according to the Indiana Economic Development Corp. The facility is at 700 Bartram Parkway, east of Interstate 65.

Interstate Warehousing has 175 full-time employees in Indiana and plans to begin hiring the additional warehouse associates this summer, the IEDC said.

The IEDC offered Interstate Warehousing up to $200,000 in conditional tax credits and up to $100,000 in training grants. The city of Franklin approved an additional property-tax abatement and tax-increment financing at the request of the Johnson County Development Corp.

"Over the past few years, we have seen solid growth from the customers that we service out of our Franklin facility," said Chuck Tippmann, president of Tippmann Group, in a prepared statement. "In order to keep up with that customer growth, we are continuing to expand our operations in Franklin. We anticipate future growth in the coming years and have a master site plan in place that will allow this facility to expand even further as our customers continue to grow their respective business."

Tippmann Group operates cold-storage facilities in Ohio, Michigan, Colorado, Illinois, Virginia and Tennessee. Interstate Warehousing is among the top 10 refrigerated warehouse companies in North America with more than 80 million cubic feet of refrigerated and frozen storage space throughout the country.