Food Maker Launches $40M HQ, Warehouse

IRWINDALE, CA-Seventh Street Development of Long Beach has broken ground here on a new $40 million, 655,000-square-foot corporate headquarters, manufacturing and warehouse facility for Huy Fong Foods Inc. in one of the largest commercial real estate projects undertaken in Los Angeles County this year, according to Seventh Street principal Craig Furniss. Seventh Street is developing the property as a build-to-suit for Huy Fong, which is a leader in the Asian foods market, known as the maker of Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce and other products.

Huy Fong will consolidate its operations, currently housed in two separate locations totaling 232,000 square feet in nearby Rosemead, to the new project when it is completed in the fall of 2011. The new facility will be built on a 23-acre site at Azusa Canyon Road and Cypress Street. The redevelopment project is expected to eventually add 190 new jobs to the city's employment base and provide $1.5 million annually to the City of Irwindale over the next 10 years in the form of taxes, fees and other payments.

Privately held Seventh Street was selected by the City of Irwindale in 2008 to develop the blighted site that had been vacant for more than 12 years. According to Furniss, Huy Fong Foods was attracted to Irwindale because of its favorable business climate and the availability of a site large enough to accommodate the company's current and future growth.

Furniss notes that Huy Fong, which sells more than 20 million bottles of its Sriracha chili sauce a year, plans on tripling its employee base and growing its manufacturing capacity tenfold by 2016 to meet demand. “With many of its employees living in the area, it was important to Huy Fong to stay in the San Gabriel Valley, which has been its home since 1987,” Furniss says. “Irwindale was one of the few areas able to accommodate Huy Fong's space requirement and still make financial sense from a development and user perspective.”

The California Mission style building will include 26,000 square feet of office space, 150,000 square feet of manufacturing space and 480,000 square feet of warehouse space all under one roof. As development manager, Seventh Street assisted Huy Fong Foods in the acquisition of the site and negotiation of a development agreement with the city, obtained necessary entitlements and California Environmental Quality Act clearances for the project, selected the design and construction team, and will oversee the construction of the facility.

Although the owners will not seek LEED certification, the project will be developed “following the highest standards for high-performance, sustainable buildings,” Seventh Street says. KPRS Construction Services based in Brea, CA has been named general contractor. The design team is led by RKZ Architects and Walden & Associates Civil Engineers.