Closing Juice Plant: Parking, Homes, Shops?

It’s official. The maker of Florida’s Natural orange juice is closing its Fullerton plant after putting workers there on notice last month about the prospect of a shutdown.

The question now is what happens to the juice plant, in Fullerton’s bustling downtown.

The city wants to build a parking structure there to serve downtown and the neighboring train station.

Lake Wales, Fla.-based Citrus World Inc., the plant’s operator, would like to sell the site for redevelopment as homes and businesses, which would bring top dollar for the land.

The city is open to redevelopment, according to Rob Zur Schmiede, executive director of the Fullerton redevelopment agency.

“It is an extremely well located parcel in relationship to the rest of our downtown and the train station,” Zur Schmiede said. “There are a number of opportunities that are going to be pursued.”

For now, the city and Citrus World, a growers’ cooperative, are in talks about the site.

Citrus World plans to shut the plant by spring and lay off 80 people at the decades-old site, said Charles Matthews, vice president of operations for the cooperative.

The plant, which covers about 120,000 square feet, packages orange juice sold on the West Coast and is one of the last commercial relics of the orange industry in Orange County.

Production is set to shift back to Florida.

The high cost of doing business in California, growing competition and changing product lines forced the closure, according to Matthews.

“We hate to leave the community because the community has been good to us,” he said.

Citrus World bought the plant about 25 years ago.

The city’s goal is for a parking garage on the five-acre site.

The garage would serve the Fullerton Transportation Center across the street from the juice plant, which is at 130 W. Santa Fe Ave. Parking also would serve restaurants and bars in the area.

In the past few years, downtown Fullerton has become a hub of trendy eateries and nightspots.

Citrus World hopes to avoid selling the site purely for parking because it would lower the potential price, Matthews said.

Instead, he said the cooperative would like to see a mix of commercial and residential buildings on the site.

Across the street, Seal Beach-based Olson Co. is building SOCO Walk, which calls for 120 lofts next to the train station.

“We have spoken with some of the local development groups, and we’ll continue to explore those points,” Matthews said. “We’re trying to understand what the city needs and, at the same time, what is right for the owners.”

The site, now zoned for industrial use, would have to be rezoned for homes or shops.

The plant, known locally by its sign outside for Citrus World’s Donald Duck brand of orange juice, likely will be razed.

The city could use at least two acres of the site for a parking structure of 1,200 spaces or so, Zur Schmiede said.

The city could pursue a project where it gets land for parking and a developer takes on the rest of the site, he said.

Parking is scarce at Fullerton’s train station, which handles MetroLink and Amtrak lines.

During evenings and weekends, parking for the city’s restaurants and bars is a problem.

“We have a 400-space garage” near the train station, Zur Schmiede said. “It’s full everyday. We have a full flat (lot). It’s full every day. We’ve got on-street parking. That’s full every day. We have an (old) railroad right-of-way area with just dirt and rocks. It’s full every day.”

Parking is set to get worse with redevelopment and more train traffic. The Orange County Transportation Association voted recently to double the number of stops by MetroLink trains.

A parking structure would take two to three years to open at the Citrus World site, Zur Schmiede said.

“We’re ready and willing to sit down with Citrus,” he said. “The decision to close the facility is not the city’s. They’ve made the decision. It’s our job as folks involved in economic development to come up with alternate uses.”

The closure has been some time in coming.

When Citrus World first bought the plant around 1980, it sent juice concentrate to Fullerton for processing.

Workers added water to the concentrate before it was sent off to grocers up and down the West Coast. It also did packaging for outside brands.

By the end of the 1980s, World Citrus shifted to freshly squeezed juice. The move helped the cooperative compete with big brands, such as Tropicana Products Inc., part of Pepsico Inc.

The change cut the amount of processing in Fullerton. At the same time, the plant lost contracts for packaging outside brands, including for Ocean Spray Cranberries Inc.

The plant had mostly older equipment that couldn’t handle newer plastic bottling.

“The packaging migrated to a lot of equipment we did not have,” Matthews said.

Business Costs

Add to that the cost of doing business in California, he said.

Wages are about 20% higher here than in Florida, according to Matthews. Unlike most of Citrus World’s other sites, Fullerton’s plant is unionized.

Electricity runs about 5% higher than in Florida. Then there are workers’ compensation insurance costs and the need for earthquake insurance, Matthews said.

Citrus World has extra space at its 500,000-square-foot site about two hours north of its Florida headquarters, he said.

The cooperative tried selling the plant to other food and drink processors, according to Matthews.

The cost of food processing in OC was a deterrent for at least a couple of possible buyers, he said.

“As they looked at the economics, the costs weren’t justified,” he said.