Lilly in the Valley: An Inside Look at Eli Lilly's Lehigh Valley Investment

The phone rang the Sunday before Christmas.

“Are you sitting down,” the familiar voice asked. “It’s over. We did it. Lilly is coming to Pennsylvania.”

It was Rick Siger, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Community & Economic Development.

Eli Lilly and Company CEO Dave Ricks had just called Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro to give him the news, triggering a phone chain among us Lilly warriors, who’d lived with this recruitment, quietly and clandestinely, under a nondisclosure agreement and the fear that a leak would end it.  

“I called you first, well, right after I called Ben,” Secretary Siger said.

The Ben is Ben Kirshner, Chief Transformation and Opportunity Officer for Pennsylvania, appointed by Shapiro when he created the special unit in the Governor’s Office with his first executive order in January 2023.

The project is a $3.5 billion pharmaceutical manufacturing facility to be built in the Lehigh Valley, located about equidistant from downtown Philadelphia and New York City’s Lower Manhattan.

Part of Lilly’s massive new program to build manufacturing in the U.S., the plant will be the largest life science project in Pennsylvania history and the Lehigh Valley’s largest economic development since its halcyon days of Bethlehem Steel, which grew over more than a century during two industrial revolutions.

Before Ricks and Shapiro stepped to a stage in downtown Allentown’s Da Vinci Science Center to announce Lilly’s selection of Pennsylvania on January 30th, the project was known only by the code names, Project Whistler, and, ultimately, Project Kennedy. No one ever asked why Whistler and Kennedy. It didn’t matter.

What mattered was that the Lehigh Valley location was competing with 300 other sites, including a few in the Philadelphia market, for one of four new Lilly facilities to be built in the U.S. In the end, Lilly also chose sites in Texas, Alabama, and Virginia, much more common states in recent decades for multi-billion-dollar manufacturing sites.

For decades, southern and western U.S. states have lured mega projects like automobile and EV battery plants, large semiconductor fabricators, and other life science and advanced manufacturing facilities with very generous state incentives and tax breaks, shovel-ready sites often owned or aided by local governments, and lower labor costs.

It took the extraordinary alignment of a new approach in Pennsylvania, an economic renaissance in the Lehigh Valley built upon manufacturing, hard work, some good fortune – and, most of all, Lilly’s commitment to make medicines in the U.S.

For Pennsylvania, it started with Shapiro supporter and transition team chair Jeff Marrazzo, the founder and CEO of Spark Therapeutics, a gene therapy startup sold to the Roche Group for $4.8 billion in 2019. Marrazzo advocated for Pennsylvania to Lilly’s leadership on the state being a good place for life sciences, resulting in several Philadelphia locations getting a look in Lilly’s national search.

Though those didn’t work, before walking away, Lilly’s national site selection consultant, BLS & Co., who had done work in the Lehigh Valley, sent me an email asking if we had a site to meet the specs for large medicine production.

We did.

Manufacturing is the largest part of the Lehigh Valley economy with $9 billion in GDP coming from more than 700 manufacturers, accounting for 16% of the region’s economy, compared to the 11% share of the U.S. economy. It’s a top 15% manufacturing market in the U.S., ranked as the country’s top mid-size market for economic development in 2025 by Site Selection magazine.

We had the perfect site. There were hundreds of acres of Pennsylvania Dutch farmland in Upper Macungie Township, Lehigh County, located along Interstate 78 on the region’s western border owned by area developer and turkey farmer David Jaindl. It was zoned industrial, allowed pharma manufacturing by right, had a new access road under construction, and a new interstate interchange in planning.

The site was a finalist for a pharmaceutical plant five years ago during the term of a different governor, losing to Delaware. That loss taught us what was needed to win, the first of which was out of our control: a deeply committed and engaged state leadership. Shapiro fixed that. He’s brought an economic development focus that’s put Pennsylvania in play where it didn’t used to be.

His work began with the hiring of both DCED Secretary Siger and Kirshner, veterans of higher-level government and private sector success. Siger did economic work in the Obama administration and academic administration at Carnegie Mellon, while Kirshner is a successful tech entrepreneur who’s done well enough to not have to work.

The state’s first-ever Transformation Officer, Kirshner is charged with cutting red tape, streamlining permitting and busting up agency silos. He’s the tip of Shapiro’s charge “to get stuff done,” and enjoys doing it. The Rick and Ben Team knocked heads, corralled agencies, and lined-up money to put Pennsylvania in play.

In the Lehigh Valley, LVEDC coordinated an effort with landowner Jaindl on site preparation and access roads, local leaders on planning and permitting, utilities on delivering electricity, gas, water and sewer, and educators and schools on workforce talent and supply. A critical element of which is the development of a new life science training center at Lehigh Carbon Community College, modeled on a training center at Wake Tech in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, near a similar Lilly plant.

Combined with the state, it was a dream team of people committed to making it happen. Victory truly had a lot of fathers and mothers.

But, before victory there was defeat, and another lesson in it – money also matters. After 14 months of planning the right site, workforce supply and speed to market, Lilly thanked us and told us Project Whistler would go elsewhere. We learned it was Virginia, whose incentive and tax package was $80 million better.

We knew our site was good and that there were more plants unannounced. Instead of asking why we lost, we asked if we could be considered for another one.

Gov. Shapiro was the messenger. He developed a personal relationship with Ricks through text and phone calls. U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick was doing the same, trading notes with the governor. Two weeks later we were in the running for Lilly’s Project Kennedy, a larger plant, with significantly more investment, and more jobs. So much so that it qualified for a never-before-used tax credit established following the federal CHIPS Act to help attract mega semiconductor or life science facilities that required at least a $2.5 billion investment.

The by-right tax credit added $50 million to Pennsylvania’s incentive package, which included $25 million in PA Sites funding, and a $25 million PA First grant, making it a $100 million offer.

Sometimes it takes a little luck.

Four months later, Ricks was calling Shapiro with the holiday message that triggered the phone chain. When Secretary Siger called me, I told him, yes, I was sitting down.

“So, no more Whistler or Kennedy, we can start just calling it Lilly.”

Don Cunningham is President & CEO of the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corp.