A Los Alamitos-based bakery that’s one of the West Orange County city’s largest employers is slated to close its doors next month, according to state records.
Bloomfield Bakers, a maker of private-label cookies, crackers, cereals and other products, has filed plans with the state to lay off more than 450 employees at the end of February.
The layoffs apparently are a result of the imminent closure of the company’s three-building manufacturing and warehouse facility on Bloomfield Street. The complex includes about 140,000 square feet of space about a mile from the San Diego (I-405) Freeway, near the intersection of Cerritos Avenue.
The building primarily is used to make private-label nutritional bars that are sold to grocers, according to regulatory filings. The facility also has been used to make cookies and pies, according to trade reports.
City officials said Bloomfield recently lost a large account to make Clif Bars, a popular organic nutritional bar, which prompted a decision to move its remaining operations to locations outside OC.
In 2009, Berkeley-based Clif Bar & Co. announced a voluntary recall of a more than 12 million Bloomfield-made products, citing potential salmonella poisoning caused by tainted peanut butter.
Calls to Bloomfield for comment on this story were not returned.
Bloomfield also has a newer, estimated 180,000-square-foot plant in Azusa that it purchased about a decade ago. It operates that location under the Lovin Oven LLC name, and currently makes crackers, granola bars and other pastries.
The company’s Azusa facility is expected to remain open. It’s not known how many jobs might be transferred there from Los Alamitos, or whether any of the jobs cuts that have been announced will come at the Azusa facility.
“They’re moving what they can (from Los Alamitos),” said Steven Mendoza, community development director for the city of Los Alamitos.
City officials are working with the Los Alamitos building’s owner—an entity affiliated with one of Bloomfield’s founders, according to San Diego-based market tracker CoStar Group Inc.—to find a replacement tenant, Mendoza said.
It’s one the city’s larger industrial properties.
There have been no indicators that the building is being put up for sale, according to area brokers.
Any significant vacancy in the area would be a rarity of late for Los Alamitos’ industrial market.
Los Alamitos’ core industrial market includes 103 buildings that total about 2.6 million square feet of space, according to data from Newport Beach-based brokerage Voit Real Estate Cos.
The city’s vacancy rate for industrial buildings finished last year at less than 2%, according to the brokerage’s latest data.
Bloomfield, whose origins in Los Alamitos date back to the late 1970’s, was acquired in 2007 by St. Louis-based Ralcorp Holdings Inc., a publically-traded generic-foods company. The cash-and-stock deal was said to be worth nearly $140 million.
Bloomfield Bakers reportedly had annual sales of $188 million at the time of that sale.
Ralcorp said at the time that Bloomfield and Lovin Oven would continue their operations in both Azusa and Los Alamitos, which combined employ about 600 people, according to the company’s website.
Ralcorp, which counts a market value of $4.8 billion, last week announced plans to spin off some of its cereals business into a separate business known as Post Holdings Inc. The operations of Bloomfield Bakers aren’t believed to be part of the business being spun off.
Los Alamitos’ most recent financial report lists the bakery as the city’s sixth-largest employer, with 150 employees at the end of 2010.
The much higher figure cited in Bloomfield’s disclosure of planned layoffs in Los Alamitos includes 286 temporary positions. State filings also show that the company laid off 67 full-time Los Alamitos employees in December.
The city’s largest employer is said to be the Los Alamitos Medical Center, with 1,100 employees. No. 2 is locally based aerospace manufacturer Arrowhead Products with 515 employees.
