Former Casanova Meats West Babylon property sells for $3 million

A Manhattan-based investor bought Casanova Meats’ former storage facility in West Babylon for $3 million, with plans to revamp the buildings and bring in new retailers.

Anchor Capital Group bought the two, roughly 26,000-square-foot buildings at 422 to 426 Great East Neck Rd. from Casanova Meats last week, principal Max Padway said.

Anchor buys and renovates industrial properties on Long Island, and plans to follow the same playbook here, Padway said.

He said he plans to renovate the property and bring in industrial tenants in need of cold storage solace, plus new family-friendly stores for the retail portion of the buildings facing Great East Neck Road to serve students from West Babylon High School nearby.

“We think a dessert-type place — like a fro-yo or an ice cream — would be good for the after school crowd,” Padway said.

Casanova Meats, which sold the buildings, used the space to store and cut its steaks and seafoods, said Hunter Brodman, chief operating officer of Casanova Meats, which moved to a larger space in Haupague last year. Padway said he hoped to find a similar cold storage tenant to lease the space.

Anchor’s purchase comes as Long Island continues to see “robust” demand for industrial space, said John Giannuzzi, a senior director at the Melville office of the brokerage Cushman & Wakefield, who arranged the sale for Casanova Meats with his colleague Nicholas Gallipoli.

Companies leased 1.1 million square feet in Long Island industrial buildings in the first quarter this year as food and beverage, e-commerce and logistics tenants expanded. That represented a 53.6% increase from the same period last year, according to a Cushman & Wakefield report.

Long Island saw even more activity in the second quarter, with 1.7 million square feet of industrial space leased, Giannuzzi added.

Giannuzzi expected the buildings to attract tenants like food distribution companies, meat suppliers or bakeries in need of space, given the limited amount of cold storage buildings available on Long Island.

Padway said he plans to renovate and lease the property as soon as possible, redoing the buildings' roofs, signs, landscaping and fencing.

As for the cold storage space, Padway said that Anchor was “willing to invest heavily in the property to build it out to a specific tenants’ needs,” though he declined to share specific financials.

Anchor’s buy-and-renovate strategy is common for investors, who redo buildings to make them “much more appealing” to new tenants, said Mario Asaro, president at the Melville-based real estate brokerage Industry One Realty.

Casanova Meats moved out of the site last year for a more appealing property of their own. The family-owned business relocated to a 50,000-square-foot building at 430 Wireless Blvd. in Hauppauge after outgrowing its West Babylon space, Brodman told Newsday.

The $21 million expansion allowed Casanova to distribute its meats to around 1,200 restaurants in New York, New Jersey and the Philadelphia area, up from about 700 eateries in 2024, Brodman said.