Nor-Cal Beverage Co. is expanding its already-sizeable local presence with a big lease at a Fullerton industrial building.
The Sacramento-based co-mpany—one of the largest bottlers and packers of juices, energy drinks and other beverages on the West Coast—has leased 244,800 square feet at a distribution center on East Lambert Road.
The space was vacated a few years ago by Taiwan-based Foxconn Electronics Inc.
The deal appears to be the largest new industrial lease that Orange County has seen in a year based on square feet, according to local brokerage data.
Nor-Cal now owns or leases about 600,000 square feet of space in OC; its other local properties are located a few miles away in Anaheim.
Warehousing
The Fullerton building, located at 458-486 E. Lambert Road, will be used for warehousing. The company is expected to move into the space as soon as next month.
Nor-Cal’s local bottling operations will remain in Anaheim, according to Tom Dorman, first vice president with the Orange office of CBRE Group Inc.
The Anaheim site is used to make, package and ship chilled juices for Coca-Cola Co., Citrus World Inc. in Florida, and Corona-based Hansen Natural Corp., maker of juices and Monster energy drinks.
Nor-Cal also makes its own GoGirl energy drinks for women, and distributes beer for Anheuser-Busch Cos., part of Belgium-based Anheuser-Busch InBev.
About 27 million of the 45 million beverage cases the company made last year were made in Anaheim.
The lease in Fullerton is the second notable real estate transaction in OC that Nor-Cal has made in as many years.
The company occupies 312,000 square feet of space at 1226 N. Olive St. in Anaheim, where it has a manufacturing building that it bought for roughly $10 million about 10 years ago.
It has reportedly put another $40 million in upgrades to the site, which has been a food and beverage plant since the 1930s, and was once owned by Bing Crosby in the 1950s, according to company officials.
Last year it paid another $5.9 million for a 5-acre property adjacent to the North Olive site, which holds another 50,000 square feet of warehouse, office and factory space.
The move into the second Anaheim facility is part of an ongoing expansion of the family-owned company’s local bottling operations, Dorman said.
The company opted to move all its warehousing facilities to another site and focus on bottling and packaging in Anaheim, he said.
Right Size
The Fullerton property, located near the city line with Brea, “is the right size for the company, and it’s close to Anaheim,” said Dorman, who represented Nor-Cal in the lease.
CBRE Group’s Ben Seybold and Sean Ward represented the Fullerton building’s New York-based landlord, Clarion Partners, in the transaction.
200 Workers Here
Nor-Cal, which started in 1937, employs about 200 people in Orange County, and about 600 people in total.
Nor-Cal made a name for itself in the industry in the 1990s by bottling and distributing various Coca-Cola brands, among others.
The company got out of soft drinks in 2007 and spent about a year replacing equipment with new machines that help mix ingredients into beverages and packages them in bottles, cans and plastic boxes.
The company has yearly sales of about $200 million. Its competitors include Niagara Bottling Co., which has operations in Irvine, and Cliffstar Corp. of New York.
Another facility the company operates in Loomis, outside of Sacramento, was reportedly damaged in a fire last month, according to local reports.
The new lease in Fullerton isn’t related to the fire at the company’s Sacramento-area facility, Dorman said.
The Fullerton lease is slated to run for 65 months, according to brokerage data.
Clarion Partners is expected to put significant tenant improvements into the building, which is part of a larger property dubbed the Fullerton Distribution Center.
Clarion bought the roughly 406,000-square-foot distribution center in 2007 for just under $40 million.
Foxconn, which made PCs, components and telecommunications gear at the site, closed its Fullerton operations in mid-2009 and moved its area operations to a smaller facility in the City of Industry.
The Foxconn Electronics had been one of Orange County’s largest contract electronics makers, with about 800 workers at its peak.
FedEx First
The site, one of the larger industrial spaces in OC, had sat empty before for a couple years before landing another big tenant last year, with Fed-Ex inking a 161,560-square-foot lease.
The property now is full following the Nor-Cal lease, taking one of the larger empty industrial spaces in North OC off the market.
Higher-end OC industrial sites such as the Fullerton Distribution Center now count a vacancy rate of less than 1%, according to CBRE data.
