Andrew Gruel, a celebrity chef who owns Calico Fish House and founded the Slapfish restaurant chain, wanted to make it easier to do business in Surf City.
After Gruel was appointed in March to fill a vacancy on the Huntington Beach City Council, one of his first efforts was to streamline the permitting process so businesses can move into their spaces sooner.
“That effort has already resulted in a 23% increase in permits issued to businesses compared to a year ago,” Mayor Casey McKeon told the Business Journal.
Now, Orange County’s fourth largest city appears to be making a rebound, particularly in aerospace and defense with new companies like Karman Space & Defense, Mach Industries and Archer Aviation joining longtime giant employer Boeing Co. Restaurant and finance companies also call Huntington Beach their home, including BJ’s Restaurants Inc., a casual dining chain with more than $1.3 billion in annual sales, and Nuvision, a growing credit union with $3.9 billion in assets.
It’s another signal that Huntington Beach is aiming to become what the mayor calls “the best place to do business.”
In recent years, Huntington Beach has been overshadowed by OC cities like Irvine, where medtech is booming, and Newport Beach, where financial giants garner international attention.
Well-regarded real estate investors are also betting on Surf City.
Shopoff Realty is planning to spend $500 million to $700 million to develop a hotel and residential complex on 27 acres.
The mayor plans to increase promotion of Huntington Beach, which he says has a “diverse economic base” of 11,000 businesses.
“The more we improve the advocacy of the existing business community, the more we’ll attract other businesses,” said the mayor, who was appointed to his position on Dec. 2 by the City Council.
No. 4-ranked Huntington Beach has a population of 193,134, roughly unchanged from a year ago. General fund revenue climbed 6.3% to $301.7 million for the 2024-25 fiscal year, according the Business Journal’s latest list of OC Cities.
Meet the New Chamber CEO
“The city is not just a beach town,” the mayor told the Business Journal.
To promote this and attract new businesses to the city, the Chamber of Commerce has made leadership changes.
Max Daffron was recently appointed as that group’s first chief executive in eight years. Daffron, who previously worked in economic development, said the chamber wanted to get back to “real business advocacy” that adds value to the local community. He is developing a plan that will be introduced early next year.
“Traditionally, when you think about beach cities and beach city economies, a lot of it is very retail, like visitor-serving retail,” Daffron told the Business Journal. “What the city of Huntington Beach has is unique for it is a very diverse industry mix.”
The city is well known for its tourism events, such as surfing contests and the annual Pacific Airshow. Less well known is that Huntington Beach’s manufacturing sector is the city’s largest employer, providing 12,325 jobs across 548 establishments.
Manufacturing got a jump start in the 1960s when McDonnell Douglas opened a 187-acre site that built part of the upper rocket stages for the Apollo space program. In recent years, Boeing, which bought McDonnell Douglas in the 1990s, has reduced its presence in Orange County from almost 14,000 in 2000 to 5,300 this year, according to the Business Journal’s annual lists of the largest employers.
Nonetheless, Boeing remains the largest employer in Huntington Beach, with a headcount of 3,200, according to the city.
The city’s next largest employer is Cambro Manufacturing, a foodservice supplier with 650 employees in Huntington Beach. Its products— such as containers, food carts, kitchen equipment and insulated food delivery bags—are used by hundreds of foodservice clients across the U.S.
While Boeing is a big player, the city has attracted other aerospace and defense companies, such as Safran, a French-based aerospace giant with a Huntington Beach factory that manufactures in-flight entertainment systems.
Karman is on the rise.
It was formed in 2021 when Amro Fabricating Corp. and Aerospace Engineering Corp. combined.
Karman, which employs 516 in Orange County, has been a star on Wall Street since its IPO in February as its shares have more than doubled to $69.70 and a $9.2 billion market cap (NYSE: KRMN). It is the most valuable publicly traded company headquartered in Huntington Beach, followed by BJ’s, which has an $873 million market cap (Nasdaq: BJRI).
Mach Industries is a defense company startup founded by a young entrepreneur, Ethan Thornton.
The Thiel Fellow dropped out of MIT at age 19 to start Mach in 2023. This year, the company announced plans to develop military drones in partnership with Florida-based HevenDrones. The company was also awarded, in March, a U.S. Army contract to develop a vertical takeoff cruise missile.
Archer Aviation, a creator of flying electric air taxis, moved into a 57,000-square-foot site in Huntington Beach in April.
The San Jose-based company, which has partnered with Costa Mesa’s Anduril Industries on eVTOL-related defense technology, plans to make Orange County a “critical visitor hub” during the 2028 Summer Olympics by transporting passengers to key venues across the region. The flying taxi network will also provide support for emergency services and security.
The company’s site at 15400 Graham St. in Surf City will be used primarily to develop composites used in the aircraft for now, company General Counsel Eric Lentell told the Business Journal in June.
Mayor McKeon said the city this year signed a letter of intent with Archer to help the company apply for a federal grant.
When it comes to attracting new businesses to Huntington Beach, the mayor said he wants “more Archers” to come to the city.
The mayor said there’s more opportunities for other manufacturers in the city also—especially with projects like the second phase of Sares Regis’ Huntington Gateway Business Park, where the developer has built new industrial buildings.
“These firms provide high-tech jobs in the city, and we want to bring more of them,” Mayor McKeon said.
McKeon himself is a business owner in the commercial real estate sector where he specializes in renovating shopping centers, such as one on the southeast corner of Warner Avenue and Springdale Street, which is across the street from his family’s business, the Beef Palace Butcher Shop.
New Ocean-facing Residential
Orange County developers have secured choice spots on the Huntington Beach coast for upcoming residential projects.
Shopoff Realty Investments is developing a mixed-use project with a 215-room hotel, 200-plus houses, 50 affordable apartments with 50% dedicated to the hotel workers and 19,000 square feet of retail on 29 acres.
The development, formerly Magnolia Tank Farm, is near the corner of Magnolia Street and Pacific Coast Highway about one block away from Huntington State Beach.
The project, when built, will be the largest mixed-use development to open in Huntington Beach since Pacific City opened in phases nearly a decade ago. Shopoff CEO Bill Shopoff estimated that the site could be worth $500 million to $700 million once development is complete, or about $17.2 million to $24.1 million per acre.
Construction is slated to begin in early 2026.
About a mile north of the Huntington Beach Pier, Irvine-based WJK Development Co. plans to convert ocean-facing land into lots with 10 luxury homes priced at $7 million to $8 million each.
Each home would rise three levels, or 35 feet, tall with unobstructed views of Catalina Island and may include a rooftop deck, pool and spa. The Coastal Commission has approved the project, which is now in the middle of grading, according to WJK CEO Grant Keene. WJK Development bought the property at 1810 Pacific Coast Highway for about $10 million last year.
Second Largest Industry
Retail is the second largest employer in Huntington Beach, providing 10,149 jobs at 1,154 establishments, according to the city’s 2024 jobs data.
Bella Terra, Huntington Beach’s largest shopping center, come under new ownership and management in January. Previous owners, DJM Capital Partners, had plans to add another residential component to the center by tearing down the now closed Burlington Coat Factory and an adjacent building to construct a new seven-story mixed-use project that includes 300 residential apartment units, approximately 25,000 square feet of new ground floor retail space and a three-level parking garage with 404 residential spaces.
PGIM Real Estate is now the Sole Owner and added Centennial as property manager.
Tourism
Huntington Beach, of course, is world famous for its surf, hence the moniker Surf City. It reported 2.3 million visitors to the city in 2024, a 4.4% increase compared to the prior year.
Visitor spending hit a record $580 million in 2024. Omark Holmes, chief marketing officer at Visit Huntington Beach, noted that 71% of the total was spent at local businesses.
Instead of a traditional convention center, Huntington Beach has taken four of its oceanfront resorts—Hyatt Regency Resort and Spa, The Waterfront Beach Resort, a Hilton Hotel, Kimpton Shorebreak Hotel and Paséa Hotel & Spa—and combined the properties into an offering for group bookings and conferences. Holmes called the packaged properties The HB Collection, where groups can book all four hotels for multi-day events.
The Waterfront and Hyatt Regency hotels also added new dining venues to the beachfronts in front of the respective buildings this year.
“It’s not just the hotels business,” Holmes said. “The whole destination is our asset.”
A Menu to Improve Business
Andrew Gruel, who started Slapfish “with less than $40,000 and a food truck,” used his experiences of expanding the seafood chain across the country to improve the business environment in Huntington Beach.
“I saw how a good council can contribute to a good business environment,” Gruel, who was appointed to the city council in March, told the Business Journal.
“The goal is to get more businesses open. The hardest hurdle is the first one, which is getting open.”
Gruel and Mayor Casey McKeon’s collaboration created a platform called Streamline Surf City as a one-stop-shop for launching a business in Huntington Beach. The program is an online hub for applicants to be guided by the city’s community development department during each step of a new venture. Most importantly, it brings permits online, allowing applicants to digitally upload documents and schedule inspections online.
Part of what got the project started was McKeon’s business sense, Gruel said. McKeon got involved when he began to run for mayor and met Gruel, who spoke of the general process of opening restaurants.
Gruel, who opened Calico Fish House in Sunset Beach two years ago, said he learned a lot about how to improve the permit process from the different markets he opened Slapfish restaurants in.
“I took a lot of what I saw in good markets… and set a baseline for where we should be,” he said.
“We want to be the home of the business that grows into a multi-unit franchise and chain,” Gruel added.
